


Falling For Cold Hands (the rewrite)

by BigScaryDinos



Category: Saw (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Blood, Depression, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, I Will Go Down With This Ship, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Past Torture, Past Violence, Post-Bathroom Trap (Saw), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Slow Burn, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, maybe it will
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:54:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 31,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28177215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BigScaryDinos/pseuds/BigScaryDinos
Summary: A little over ten years ago, Lawrence Gordon escaped from a trap that nearly claimed his life, leaving behind the only person who really saw him for who he was. Now the man he assumed he left for dead is knocking on his door and it's all he can do to let him in._Also known as : a little over ten years ago I wrote a 30,000 word Saw Fanfiction. This is the rewrite. Tags may be added. Hang in there boys and girls, it'll be a long one.
Relationships: Adam Faulkner-Stanheight/Lawrence Gordon
Comments: 13
Kudos: 46





	1. Chapter 1

If there had ever been a person who claimed that prosthetics do not hurt - then it was pretty obvious that they had never had to wear one. At least that was Lawrence’s opinion on the matter, hobbling half halfheartedly around the halls of the hospital, feeling the way the coarse insole rubbed against the tender skin of his calf. It itched. It ached. His toes twitched a few times until he remembered he didn’t have toes anymore. It was like a disease, this half limb still stuck to him aching and paining him daily. He wished they just took the fucking knee almost every day. 

The pain that he felt now, nearly constantly, was a pain that was different from the acute type of pain he had felt in the past - no matter what kind of injury. This was the type of pain that couldn’t be quelled with his countless percocets or oxycodones. He had long ago bypassed tramadol and tylenol, which still lived on hand for bridging the gap between stable and an elated high on the hardest days. This was past one nightcap drink. This was past all the coping mechanisms he’d been taught his whole life. Past therapy and talking about issues. This wasn’t just a sharp pain from relearning basic skills. This was the ache of living with yourself. 

And it went on and on all day. Six am until six pm. Sometimes earlier. Sometimes later. Sometimes even later than that. He had it lucky though. With his wife divorcing him, his only child grown into a stranger who texted him infrequently at best, his foot rotting in an evidence locker. No. He was the lucky one. He was a survivor, damn it. A god damn bonafide Hercules. The kind of man who would pull through in the final moments only for it all to mean jack shit nonsense. A bullshit trial where they tried to pin all of what had happened on him, as if he hadn’t just mutilated himself. At least the jury believed him. At least the hospital couldn’t legally fire him without just cause. At least he was getting a paycheck. At least he had a shit hole apartment and a 401K. At least he was alive. At least he was still here. Living and breathing and loving every minute of it. Every single miserable minute. 

No, Lawrence Gordon was not upset. He was not bitter. Just some days he’d wished he’d died with all his pieces still attached to him in a bathroom no bigger than his new apartment’s kitchen and dining room put together. No, his mental health was just fine. He was the last person in need of antidepressants. He didn’t need anti-psychotics or anti anxieties. He needed herbal tea. He needed pills. His pills. The right kind of pills that could turn a four hour nap into a two day black out with such a loss of time it was incredible. He just needed to rewind time and shoot himself between the eyes before the world faded to blackness and he woke up in chains. No, Lawrence Gordon wasn’t upset. Not at all. 

It was just another day. One more to add to the cycle of endless hours that added up to nothing in particular. Work. Lunch. Work. Coffee. Home. Sleep. Rinse. Dry. Scream into a covered couch cushion when the pain was too much and the feelings were going to burst from his lungs and into the air. Close his eyes for what seemed like a second. Wake up. Do it all again. Home wasn’t home anymore. Home was a house in a nice neighborhood he couldn’t afford to even visit. A house sold off to a moderate bidder. A split check. Home was a place he’d be reported to the police if he attempted to walk by. Home was a place where he was sure Alison was fucking at least a lawyer if not another doctor. Home was where Diana kept her trunks of dolls and her closets of princess costumes he would never set eyes on again, if she even still had them. He didn’t go home anymore. He went to an apartment walking distance from the hospital he worked in because he was afraid of getting in cars. It wasn’t a hard concept to understand after all. It was easy to understand on paper, more difficulty when spoken out loud. 

The front door of the complex that lead to the street never locked. His pipes creaked. His tub ran rust colored water from the spout and the shower. He lived on take out and painkillers and the cheapest beer he could find. Mixed drinks inside colorful cans. Bottles of half drank Vodka, stagnant and sitting without caps catching flies inside the backwash. Ramen noodles with silver packets of flavor. He felt like he was back in college. He only felt comfortable on the couch, sinking into the under-stuffed cushions, feeling the springs poke dangerously into his back silently asking him when was the last time he’d had his tetanus shot. Every day was like this. Every. Day. No, Dr. Gordon is as good as he’s ever been. 

Depositing his Dunkin Donuts order onto the table before him as he tugged off his shoes, he looked at the alien limb sticking from his pant leg. It was crafted to look like a foot in the way that Shoe Carnival models feet. It was hard, felt like plastic. It came in a color one shade shy of his own natural skin tone. It ended at his mid calf and it did not belong. More so than just the feeling of it being detached, it bothered his eyes. It made him dizzy and afraid with the same simple childlike fear his daughter had of creatures under the bed. Some days it was all too much. Almost all days, everything was too much. Today was just another day inside an overly long lifetime of too much - too fast - too stressful. He opened one of the orange bottles in front of him shaking out four morphine tablets. They dotted his palm like candy. He tongued them from his hand into his mouth. He swallowed them dry. His spit had left little blue streaks on his skin. He sucked at the dye.

No, Lawrence Gordon was the picture of living well. 

His doorbell hadn’t actually worked since he had moved in, he couldn’t even tell you what it sounded like to be honest - and he hadn’t been particularly surprised to hear pounding in the hall outside his flat. This was normal. Just another day inside his paradise. Pounding, screaming, cursing, crying. This apartment complex was not high class. The only papers you had to sign were lease agreements. He had tried to file complaints with the superintendent but that was a title belonging to a nameless, faceless voice at the end of a hotline number. Nothing was done with his complaints and nothing would ever be done with them. It was all just noise inside of an echo chamber. This was just another apartment in the middle of New York that was owned and operated by a company that cared not for the ants that lived inside the farm.

At first, as he sipped his already cold coffee, he assumed they weren’t even knocking at his door. Nobody did that anymore. Nobody came to visit or asked how he was. Nobody stopped by. It had to be the kids next door, running around out in the hall. Or playing a joke. Or doing anything at all but being honest visitors to his humble abode. 

He sipped and wondered about his life and let himself stew inside his own misery for a few more minutes. Every day he allowed himself that much, a piece of solitude. A moment to accept his helpless hopelessness and sink his head as far down as he could and just wallow. This was his life. Ending one minute at a time, every minute ticking past never really fast enough. This coffee was pathetic, made poorly and day old; but he drank it deeply, finally feeling the thirst inside his throat that meant the pills might be kicking in. No amount of coffee would quench that familiar bone dry ache that lived inside of him once he really started taking his pills, gulping them down without regard to number. 

Then - somebody knocked again. And again. And again. It was like a thumping heartbeat from that Edgar Allen Poe book. The Tell-Tale Heart was at his doorstep banging away like it had any right to do it. Larry ran his hands through his hair, thinning and greying he felt old as he stood, righting himself after a few seconds. It took too much time anymore to get up. Took too much manpower to function. He wasn’t sure if the risk outweighed the benefit anymore. He balanced on his foot, allowing his body to accept the always strange feeling of that special _something_ sticking out from his body. His right side felt uncomfortable. He inched towards the door on his good leg and then, after a few minutes, his prosthetic. 

“I’m coming, hold on. I’m a goddamn cripple okay? I’m on my way.” He shouted, hoping to get some sympathy. He really hoped they would turn away, understand they had the wrong door. He wanted nobody to be there when he opened or the door. He wanted nothing but empty space, scared away by his loud remarks. They wanted a girl, young and sweet with her two children who lived three doors down. Her door was red and the numbers were missing but she was the only door that wasn’t plain brown wood on this floor. Easy the first time around to mistake for something that actually had numbers. Or maybe the knocker was searching for the elderly man who lived right next door and always glared with suspicion at anyone new in the complex. Maybe they wanted somebody who was in an apartment one floor up. Two floors down. Three blocks over. Anyone but him. Please god, anyone but him. 

Instead of that his prayers went unanswered and the pounding continued, louder and louder as he neared the wood. It seemed it would never stop, never cease, never soften again. This pounding would live inside his head until he died. Although he’d never say it out loud he felt the fear inside his stomach letting it’s slick wet tendrils wrap around his gut. They clenched and pulsed against his insides. He resumed his prayer under his breath in tune to the knocking. Unknown was outside. Unknown was terrifying. It was all too much. 

He wished he had a way of knowing who was at the door, wished he had some kind of window. A peephole. An intercom. Anything. Lawrence found that he wished for a lot of things that he knew would never come true. If wishes were fishes we’d all swim in riches. Di had always liked that one. His saying should say if wishes were feet that would be neat. The latch was in place, he turned the knob, it felt frozen in his palm. He cracked the door. He waited. He breathed. He didn’t speak a word as he waited for his eyes to adjust but it never fully came. The hall lights were dim, the lights from his own apartment barely piercing the darkness even as blinding as they seemed to be. The shadows engulfed the world beyond his door. 

“Yeah?” Lawrence asked the pulsing shadows in the darkness. Those wet tendrils clenched tighter in anticipation. Once upon a time he had patience. It had drained from his body alongside the two pints of blood in a warehouse basement. The dark shadow of a man stepped forward. 

“Hey.” 

It was Adam. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, there was a girl who opened a fanfiction.net account and she wrote a handful of shitty - shitty stories. When I say shitty I mean wow. These were bad. But it was also 2008 so maybe it could be forgiven a little bit. Most of the stories were on the short side, less than 3,000 words. But there was one - a passion project. A grand Saw themed fanfiction reaching 16 chapters and 36,369 words. That was A LOT.  
> Flash forward to now and this gal has written a hell of a lot more. Life has changed so dramatically that it's not even like she's the same person. She was engaged and broke it up, she's been through a lot of shit, she's gotten her degree, she's had new jobs. It's a whole new world than 2008. And she decides to pick up her ultimate passion project and rewrite the whole damn thing. The only rules she sets for herself are that it have at LEAST the same word count (if not greater) and the same characters. Everything else was up for grabs.  
> A piece about the original : It was a song fanfiction, with lyrics in each and every chapter. This time around that isn't really my speed - lol. For sure you'll see songs and music scattered around, but even the title (which I had decided to keep the same) was pulled from a song I liked the lyrics to then but had never actually listened to. I highly recommend NOT reading the original, it is really - really awful. If you happen to have read it back in the day on FF.net or seek it out now, please understand this is a total rework. It is vastly different in just about every way possible.  
> Anyway - enough ranting and rambling. Please let me know if you enjoy it. Comments always make me thrilled <3\. Enjoy!


	2. Chapter 2

“Oh Christ, no.” Lawrence said, he shut the door right in the kid’s face. He didn’t take any more time then he had to whirl on his feet and slam himself against the door as if Adam was going to break down the door with his pure force of will. He doesn’t even really know how old Adam is, but assumes he’s young. At least inside Lawrence’s mind Adam is a kid. Always young. He sees Adam inside his mind the way a person sees an idea of an old friend, more so than the old friend themselves. Always frozen in a moment, captured like a photograph. He has the door shut for no more than ten seconds when the pounding started again. Louder, less rhythmic, much more panicked. The drum beat of his own pulse rivals the knocking. 

“Larry, please. Lemme in.” He sounded as afraid as Lawrence felt, this was a nightmare. A real honest to god nightmare. It couldn’t be real. This was all imagined. Fake. Something pulled from a night terror where he stands frozen in place. The door shook as Lawrence turned his back to it and leaned against the wood. He felt the vibrations of a fist on the other side of it. “Larry, please. Come on. Just for a minute. If you want me to leave I’ll leave after I talk to you. It’s important.” This one was a hell of a good one, Lawrence thought wildly, feeling the door shaking, racking his body. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even see straight. He could see black dots floating inside his vision. He could hear and taste and touch but he’s stuck in place like a fly on a glue trap. 

“You are dead Adam. Dead. Go away.” Lawrence tried to keep his voice calm, even. He didn’t want to yell because there was no reason to. Adam died in the bathroom, Lawrence shot him in the chest. Nobody went back for him. Not a single person knew he was there. Just Lawrence and his fucked up brain, the damaged pieces creating new pathways where the trauma occurred. 

Not to be outdone he understands that his brain has done this before. This all over body hallucination of a man he’s killed. This had happened before. When he was in the hospital right after, and once during his trial. Sometimes he can swear he can hear Adam’s voice just out of reach, down a dark hall on the first floor of the hospital on night shift. A payphone that rings and rings and rings outside a 7/11. A dream he can’t touch. He soon learned nobody else saw Adam. Nobody hears his ghostly apparition. He’s alone, even when he walks to the very edge of the corridors and finds nobody, nothing but a sterile white wall. No ghost. No man. Nothing but Lawrence and his thoughts and haunted mind.

He speaks the magic words his therapist told him once what seems like decades ago. “Go away.” He repeats until it’s a silent whisper inside his mouth, stuck on the dry cotton that lives there. This unwanted guest is ruining his high. He barely feels anything close to out of body. 

“Larry, let me explain. I’m not dead. I’m not. Please let me in. Please.” His voice wasn’t the same, it was higher, it was scared. It seemed dangerously real. It was not the voice of a recording, playing at high volumes between your ears. “Larry, please I don’t...I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t just wanna be screaming my fuckin’ lungs out here in this hallway. People are gonna come looking.” His hands hit the door again and again. Lawrence wants to shout back that nobody is going to come looking. Nobody ever has. Not for Adam. 

“Doesn’t sound like you're screaming to me.” Lawrence shook, feeling the door quake behind him. He shut his eyes, this was not real. This was a wild hallucination. He wished he turned on the TV and ignored the sounds at his front door. He had learned to ignore worse over the past ten years of his life. He imagined it wasn’t too late to just walk away. Sit down on a chair and let the black dots fill his eyesight until he shut his eyes and woke up to another day. A different day. A different path. Maybe. 

“Larry. Please.” Adam tried again. Every time that he used that name it only served to make Lawrence shake harder. Nobody used that name anymore. Larry had been a nice name for a nice guy who did favors for people and kissed his wife on the lips. Larry would have held doors open for nurses on the ward. Lawrence was a name for somebody who didn’t care anymore. Lawrence was the only thing left after the bathroom. Lawrence felt like a fraud, a bastard, a liar. He was all of those things and so much more, so much worse. 

“Larry is dead, just like you are Adam.”

“Let me prove it to you. I’m real. I am. What can I do? Let me in and I’ll show you.” Adam stops pounding, either he knows there’s no point left or he knows what Lawrence is thinking. Knows his fingers are ghosting over the doorknob. The thoughts inside his head asking how bad it would be to open that door. “Think about it. Either I’m fake and letting me in will do nothing to you because I’m just a ghost - or I’m real and need real help and if you really hate me that much you can kick me out. I promise I’ll leave if you ask me to, but after you listen to me. Please just…” Adam trails off, his last argument spent into the dusty air. Everything stills for a minute. Lawrence thinks of it all, lets the argument saturate his brain. 

Lawrence is aware of the danger of that line of thinking but it’s easier than other thoughts he’s had. Thoughts about going up to the top of the building and seeing how fast it would take to hit the pavement. Thoughts of running a tub of warm water, guzzling as many pills as he can and opening a few veins. Up and down, never side to side. He’s not a highschool girl whose boyfriend left her at prom - he’s serious. Thoughts of running into traffic in downtown Manhattan during rush hour. 

Adam is probably the only other person in the world who could understand. That’s the danger. If you follow the idea that Adam did in fact die inside that bathroom, so deep underground it doesn’t even house bugs - then Adam is just the part of himself he wants to make up. Just the thing inside his brain trying to cope. Adam is his imaginary trauma friend. His PTSD coming to glorious full color 3D. Things his therapist used to tell him, enforce inside of him when he would see the black shapes of people in the edges of his vision and wonder if maybe Adam wasn’t coming back for him after all. It’s all safe to think this. It’s safe to assume he’s crazy, insane even. Maybe those pills he flushed months and months ago should have ended up inside his digestive tract. Maybe he should have tried harder to deal with his problems. 

But, if Adam isn’t dead…those are thoughts he’d rather not think. That’s a horrible line to follow, a path that leads not just into the woods, but into the darkest part of the forest where no light can ever reach. It means he escaped. It means Lawrence really isn’t alone. Sometimes it’s easier just to think you are by yourself. To remember that when you told them the address you were held at, there wasn’t a body ever found. To understand that somebody else knows what you did. It was too much and not enough at all. once. It was the type of evidence he never asked to have. It didn’t mean anything one way or another, Lawrence decided. His conviction is quick and he understands it’s a threat to his own health and safety. 

_ Please be fake. Please be fake. Please be fake.  _ Lawrence thinks, turning around and cracking the door just one inch. In all his previous dreams and hallucinations he saw Adam exactly as he did in the bathroom, after all he had nothing to compare it to. The exact body type, the stained white shirt, the dirty ripped jeans, his bare toes poking out from under the cuffed bottoms. He had dark eyes the color of coffee stains. 

The man at his door isn’t exactly the same in the way that you can say summer and winter are seasons but aren't exactly the same. He’s skinnier, much skinnier. He looks almost sick, the way his arms have nothing but stretches of muscle covered in skin. That’s saying something considering the Adam that Lawrence once knew was no heavy weight champ. His hair is lighter, it almost looks dyed, but it’s hard to tell in the dim lights. The details are fuzzy. He’s not in the same dirty clothes. They look like a new set of similarly dirty clothes. He’s wearing shoes. Not a single toe exposed. It’s all so new that Lawrence opens the door. 

For all his banging and hollering Adam doesn’t come in right away. He stands barely in the doorway and looks around the room. His eyes look caged, like he’s been backed into a wall and is not in fact the apex predator he claimed to be with all his noise in the hallway. After a minute he settles on Lawrence. His eyes are that same tired coffee stain brown. His face was the same face that Lawrence saw more often than not in his nightmares if only framed in a new light. This wasn’t the dreamy quality of imagination of perfection until shrill lights from a distance away. A faded white scar drew a line from his lip to chin in a jagged slash, at least years old. His nose seemed more crooked. His eyelashes were not so long, his face not so full. The shadow of hair dots above and below his lips. He lifts both arms behind his head and stretches - a mock of confidence. Reality threatened Lawrence’s hold of consciousness. His head spins in strange ways. 

“I can come in?” He asked, his voice now without the barrier of the door was much softer, younger sounding that Lawrence remembered, but in hindsight we see things how we want to see them. 

“What are you a vampire now? I opened the door. Come on, Jesus. Everyone is probably already looking.” Nobody is looking. Lawrence understands that well enough but if he jumps off the deep end you either float or you drown, so he treads this water carefully. 

Adam stepped into the apartment, his shoes, the color of wet asphalt, squeak against the wooden floor. He looks terrified, a beaten dog with the cage left open. His head swivels on his neck like a child’s toy, finally breaking the connection they’ve established. It’s nice, like cutting a too taut string. Lawrence feels lighter for a second without the pressure of those eyes. 

“Um, do I. Do I take these off?” 

“For Christ’s sake you just stood outside my door for five minutes carrying on and you’re asking about your shoes.” Lawrence limps back to the couch, the door standing open behind the younger man. When Lawrence sat, sinking into the cushion and finally looked he noticed that yes, Adam had to have dyed his hair. Ten years had passed but Lawrence thinks he can recall the pitch black roots. He remembers a hand, his hand touching that hair and making promises he’ll never fulfill. Now, almost looking like a faded auburn instead of his dark black Lawrence isn’t sure what to do or say. Isn’t sure where this is going, so he focuses on the hair. Adam’s roots seemed almost blond It’s a little too long. Lawrence takes stock of the rest of the man, his body seems thin, agile, and still young as he played with his fingers nervously. 

“I’m. I’m not dead.” Adam started, that high voice again. Terror had crept it’s way into his vocal chords the way that it snuck into Lawrence’s stomach.  _ What do you have to be afraid of? You came here.  _ Lawrence wants to say. He wants to shake Adam, actually just to touch him. He wants to know with concrete evidence that this, all of this, is just a scam. A lie. His brain running on and on and pumping out fantasies. He opens his mouth. 

“Okay, how did you get out?” 

“There was a girl.” Adam waved his hand away, as if the memories were smoke that he could clear from the room. He stands stock still inside the room, but only for a second before his body is moving again. The younger man is all motion, jerky and sudden. He lets Adam continue. “I don’t know who, but she thought I was dead. I don’t know what she was going to do but I woke up and I was so...tired. I, I wanted to be dead. I thought I was dead. She let me go. She just opened my chain.” His fingers still flit inside the air. He tugs at the bottom of the grey undershirt he’s wearing under the thick brown and red flannel. It’s almost summer and it seems too warm to wear those things. Lawrence doesn’t think he would make up an outfit like that. 

“A girl, a random girl just came down into that hellhole and let you go.” Lawrence reiterated, unbelieving at the man before him. Adam turned once, to shut the door unprompted. 

“I think she was working with him. I think she knows who he was.” 

“I know who he is. Everyone knows who he is. Was. He’s fucking dead. I saw the autopsy. I had a front and center seat thank you very much.” Lawrence’s voice shook. Things he tried not to think about. Things he tried to forget. Names. Faces. Cassette tapes inside the rounded sack of a stomach. The sickening smell of stage four cancer throughout every inch of the body. The sticky feeling of cerebrovascular fluid on his fingertips to just prove it was over. But it wasn’t over. Wouldn’t ever be over. And here was Adam to remind him of that. 

“She had to be working with him. I don’t know why she let me out.” Adam said, his knuckles white as he twisted his fingers against each other again and again. There was more, but he wasn’t spilling it. That was just fine, Lawrence thought watching the anxious eyes as he bounced from foot to foot. Adam was a ball of nervous energy, brought into this room with no outlet. 

“Okay, so she let you out. We don’t know why. You what? Got out of the basement and then just started living your life again?”

“No.” Adam’s face reddened, “no. I. I can’t. I can’t get out of it. Really.” His face read shame, horror, humiliation. He was the beaten down dog that Lawrence saw in the doorway. None of the human left that he’d seen in the bathroom. This Adam was something different from what he’s last seen. Really seen. It was dangerous to already think of this Adam as a person, so Lawrence shook his head once and listened. “I need help. I need, there’s gotta be somebody somewhere that understands me. Who gets it.” Adam looked up, his eyes searching Lawrence’s face for recognition, some kind of kinship, an inch of the bond they had formed in the six hours underground together. Instead Lawrence hardened, his eyes bore no similarity to the look he had those years ago. 

Lawrence had a lot to say. Assuming Adam was really Adam.  _ If you were alive why did you wait this long? If you were alive why would you let me live with myself, thinking I killed you. If you were alive where were you? If you were alive why didn’t you come forward? Why do you think that I think you’re dead. Why are you inside my head? What are you doing? What is your plan?  _

“Prove you’re real.”

Adam’s face fell, he cracked all of his knuckles. His head shook, a nervous twitch as his fingers pulled the dark shirt from his pants. He tugged the shirt over his head, catching both it and the flannel in one swoop as he wrapped them over his head and behind his thin neck. Lawrence almost looked away, but instead his eyes watched the heaving body before him. The way his stomach was more of a concave space between his chest and pants. He could count his ribs from here. The skin was marred with lines, faded white and some red. Pinks. Self harm for sure, but probably not for attention. Discolored old bruises, blues and purples, yellows. What looked like rug burn over the jut of his hips. The blue of veins stood out against the pale skin in the cool room like neon lights. 

“Here, here.” Adam begged, his fingers pointing to the scar on his chest near his right shoulder. An ugly white brand, an uneven circle that had torn through him. “The bullet went through. It was a good shot Larry. I have to be happy about that.” His fingers prodded the tissue. “Feel it.” He wasn’t smiling, more like a grimace as he struggled to make his point. 

Lawrence wanted nothing more than to never feel it, never touch that ugly white symbol of what he’d tried to do and failed. He hated looking at it almost as much and as automatically as he hated looking at his right foot, or what constituted as his right foot. He made no move to get off the couch, he just sat, staring. Adam panting as his fingers prodded his own chest. He approached the couch, sinking to his knees in front of him. 

“Please, just. I’m real, feel me. Please. It’s all real. It all happened. We can’t say it didn’t.” Adam begged, his eyes red rimmed, his face the faded pink of humiliation with his shirt hanging around his neck. “We lived it. Together.” He wrenched Lawrence’s hand from it’s place across his stomach, forcing the fingers open and pressing them against his skin without dignity or pride. 

Lawrence was surprised that it felt warm, hot almost. The gnarled white tissue felt the way it should. No fairy tail imaged soft skin, but instead the hard knots of scar tissue forming in lumps and bumps to repair the hole. He shivered. It was real. It was undeniable, there was something about touching it with his own hands that made it solidify inside of him. He thinks of all the times he’s chased Adam without a catch, he could never reach a ghost. 

“You’re not dead?” Lawrence asked, his voice cracking halfway through his question. Adam’s chest heaved, Lawrence couldn’t tear his hand away from the real warm skin, but Adam didn’t pull away from the touch. 

“No. I’m not. Never been either.” For the first time what could almost be mistaken for a grin almost flitted across his lips. His eyes stayed sad, the bags underneath real, swollen with nights of restless sleep. “I’d be lying if I didn’t think about it. But right now I need help.” 

“Help?” Lawrence finally realized what he had been doing with his greedy fingers, pulling away his hand as if he’d been burned from the touch of flesh against his fingertips. He shook his head, not so much in disagreement but pure denial instead. “I can’t help myself, how am I supposed to help you? Do I look like I’m functioning well?” He looked around the room. He takes stock of his home, the old underwear and pants sitting in a pile waiting to be washed downstairs. The open bottles across the countertops. The rancid smell of sweat that seeps into this whole building. He returns his arms to their place, crossed over his chest and waits. 

“Lawrence, please.” For a second, admit the desperate pleas a hint of sarcasm. Lawrence wants to smile, that’s the Adam he knows. “ You’re doing better than I am.” Adam shook, pulled his shirt back on, tugging it over faded scars and new cuts. Burns and bruises and red marks all hidden back up underneath the cotton. That was just fine with Lawrence. A sudden stance on dignity. “I didn’t even have this. When I got out I was...I am homeless.” His face was that terrible shade of red again, humiliation, shame, horror maring his features in a mask of emotions that did not belong to him. “I’ve been sleeping off and on at this shelter. When it’s warm I sleep by the library on fifth.” He cracked his knuckles. Lawrence wants to ask more questions, so many more questions - but he doesn’t. He finds what he needs to say and places it into just two. 

“So you need a house? A place to stay?” Lawrence wasn’t capable of pity anymore so he put on his best doctor’s voice trying to sound far away. Adam looked up between his knees, then stood - almost defiant. It always came down to something, although in this case he admitted he felt a little more  _ something _ inside his chest. This was the only person who had been through what he had if only for a few hours. Those short few mutual hours. Every second seems seared into his brain with a brand too hot to handle. 

“No. I’m not asking for a free ride. I came to you because….I think it’s not over.”

Lawrence’s stomach dropped, his chest felt heavy, his mind spun around wildly. It is over. It is over. It is over. He screamed to himself inside his skull, but his mouth was dry and he couldn’t form a word. Instead he opened and shut his lips and stared at the younger man, who began to pace. He knew it, he knew there was something more. He knew like at the end of a horror movie there will always be a twist. He swore he could smell formaldehyde. 

“I think I’ve been being followed. Stalked. I don’t know and I know this doesn’t mean jack shit to you but I started to make some connections out there and those people are being, I don’t know. Taken? Killed? I don’t fucking know anymore” His hands fly through the air inside a flurry of motion. He sighs. He’s so very real, his whole self seems to take up the small apartment and while Lawrence still battles inside himself he thinks that  _ this  _ Adam has to be real. 

“What?” Lawrence asked, barely able to form the question.

“I’ve made friends, on the street who don’t know who I am. I wasn’t like you, Larry. I didn’t have news coverage. I just crawled out of that room and made it back into the world without a camera on me. Nobody knows my face anymore than they did before I was in that room. You can’t sleep on a sidewalk without needing to get involved in the system out there. It is a system. I know it might not seem like it, but you have to make connections, you have to figure out how to live.” 

Lawrence was hoping he nodded in the right places for Adam’s monologue. 

“It started with this guy, Pete. I don’t know if that’s his real name, we don’t always tell our names out there because it doesn’t matter - but he was a really good guy to me. Always helping me out. I met him down at the old YMCA. You know, the one on Broad? He was with me a lot and then one day he was just gone. And there were more, more people. More people I talked to that have just gone missing, only people I know, only people who talk to me or help me or know me.”

“At the risk of sounding like an asshole, how does this have to do with the - with what happened to us? Don’t homeless people travel? Isn’t it hard to keep track of them.” Lawrence asked in his doctor voice again, trying not to let himself jump the leaps and bounds from fear to straight panic. He struggled but didn’t let it show. He pretended this was simply all business. 

“They have a good life around here, not houses or families or loads of cash but Pete, he was here for years. He knew the good spots for a hot meal, and the safe places to sleep. He’s spent more than ten years in this city before I ever came around. At his age you don’t just up and relocate for no reason. If he did he would tell somebody, but nobody in the network knows anything. I’m not safe out there, Larry. Honestly? I don’t think you’re safe alone in here either”

“Why?” Lawrence asked the main question on his mind. “Why us. Why again? We lived, why should anybody be trying to get us back to that place. To that...trap?” Adam paced, wringing his hands together. His head twitched, a nervous jerk that looked unintentional and automatic. 

“I’ve thought about that a lot, Larry. Cause that’s what’s not adding up in my head - until it hit me. Why did we get put in that room in the first place?”

“Because I was cheating on my wife.” He let this piece of truth slip through his lips with ice. There was no reason to lie anymore, no reason to hide things. Diana and Alison were people in the past. People who both knew the truth. Everyone knew the truth from the jurors to his coworkers to people on the street who read about him in tabloids. You would be surprised what sells a magazine once there’s a dramatic crime. Adam spun on his heels, his face a mask of rage now. Adam had already known, had the proof himself. 

“No, Lawrence. We were not making the most of our lives. We were wasting our potential. Didn’t you learn anything?” 

“Guess not.” Lawrence replied, struggling to stand and right himself on his wobbly foot. “I mean look around. I’m making the most of my life now. People hate me. I could barely get patients. I had to retire from the career I loved and now I just work in the ER. My wife left me. My daughter doesn’t remember my name.”

“Exactly!” Adam said, his hands out almost to take the older man’s in his, instead spinning away and pacing again, his steps rapid on the wooden floor. “That was it. We were supposed to learn something and live our lives. Carry out our potential. The nicest thing I’ve done for anyone since I got out of there was give this old guy three dollars once. That’s it. It’s all I could give, but it’s nothing. I’m lower than I was before that. Look at you Larry, instead of fighting through you’re sinking. We both are.” His voice raised in pitch, panic creeping from him into the walls. That’s the dangerous thing about panic, it spreads like a disease. 

“Adam, calm down.” Lawrence put his hands on the man’s shoulders. He had to admit to his pain tinged mind the theory did seem half solid, but if he had to go back to the bathroom - he didn’t want to think about it. He would kill himself right. If he woke up there tomorrow with another saw he’d use it on his neck. 

“I can’t calm down. Something is out there, and it’s coming for us. It’s going to come for us. We need to do something.” His whole body was tense. “I need you, they can’t do it again to the two of us. They can’t. We lived. We won. We can’t.” 

“We can’t.” Lawrence agreed, nodding his head sadly. His life had turned in a matter of a short half hour from I to We. We could do this. We can’t do that. We have to do this. It was hard to get the words out but he pushed them past his dry lips all the same. “We didn’t win though. There is no winning in a game like that.” His fingers had automatically started to press into the bony shoulders under him. Adam melted into the touch, shuddering again. It was clear nobody touched him anymore. Just two touch starved highly damaged people clinging to each other in the middle of a shit storm. “You can stay here.” Adam inched away from the touches, stood at arm’s length, then took a step back, his eyes narrowing to suspicious little slits. 

“I told you, I’m not here for a free ride. I just came to talk.”

“I’m not telling you not to talk. I’m telling you to stay.” Lawrence tried again, attempting to flex the muscles he’d hadn’t used in years. He tried to shake the dust off his heartstrings. Adam’s eyes stayed tiny and hard, judging and weighing the words. 

“What do you want, Larry?” Adam asked, still blunt. His words were still small sharp knives that could cut right to the point. Lawrence took his own step backwards, feeling the unease of the room filling his lungs. What did he want? He thought for a moment. What was left to lose? What did he have left to give up?

“To feel like a person. To do one goddamn decent thing for another human being. I’m tired of being a bastard.” Lawrence sighed, he met Adam’s eyes, waiting for a response. The younger man weighed the words carefully. He chewed the inner corner of his lip. 

“Okay.” Adam nodded, agreeing. “Okay. I’ll stay. I don’t want this to be some goddamn pity party though. I’m a person and I’ve been doing fine by myself. I can leave anytime, understand?”  Adam’s high clear voice rang out in the apartment, cutting through the awkward emptiness. It was Lawrence’s turn to nod. 

“Okay.”

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

“If you want the bed you can have it.” Lawrence watched Adam walk around the apartment on tiptoes, curious but cautious. A caged tiger. Lawrence pulls a thick quilt from over the back of the couch and fluffs a pillow, it’s all a big show. As if he doesn’t sleep on the couch every single night. As if this isn’t just what his day to day has become. “Also you can’t wear those clothes forever.” Lawrence nodded to the clothes on Adam’s back, the dirty jeans, the ripped grey shirt. The flannel over it all. The torn and faded green army jacket tucked neatly under his backpack, sitting by the door. Lawrence isn’t sure when it found it’s home inside his apartment, but it sits there, still as a statue that’s seemingly has always stood in that same place. Adam nodded towards his overly large backpack that Lawrence finds himself looking at before pulling his eyes away. 

“I’ve got more in there. These are the best I have.” 

“Those are the best?” Lawrence asked, unbelieving. He quirked an eyebrow up, meeting the fringe of his overly long hair. 

“Lawrence, do you think I can afford to shop at Macy’s?” The trademarked snark creeping into his voice as he inched into the kitchen. It’s been about an hour since he set foot into the apartment and it’s already back to normal. Again. A dangerous thought. Thinking any part of this is normal. Thinking he knows Adam at all. “Can I have some water?” Adam asked, even as Lawrence heard the tap turning on. 

“Help yourself.” Lawrence shouted from the bedroom as he pulled clothes from a pile under the window. An overly large grey sweatshirt that said some college he’d taught at once upon a time in a different life and a pair of stiff looking sweatpants. 

It would do

**-**

  
  


It was cold, too cold for this time of year. The clock on the microwave blinked off and on. Off and on and Lawrence felt fingers on his hips. 

“Come to bed.” The voice said and it wasn't real. It was just a ghost pulling him off the couch, to his feet _(foot, Larry. Remember that)_. The digits clutching his shirt beckoning him into the bedroom, his own bedroom. Lawrence couldn’t move, but the twisted shape helped him, supporting him as they made the slow dance away from the couch. 

“I can't.” Lawrence tried, and in a way he couldn't. “I don't even know you.”

“You know me.” The voice answered, the only light was the soft glow of street lights through the window. Everything was a blurred shape. Nothing hurt and years fell back into line. This was ten years ago. Twenty. It didn’t matter if it was here and now and real or not. Nothing mattered. 

“No I don't.” The kiss came easily, almost too easily. It wasn't then it was. It was willed into existence. It was gone just as quickly. His mouth was hot and dry, he could smell mouthwash inside the air between the two. “This is wrong.” 

“Why?” Nobody pulled away, both bodies pressed close and lips crushed lips. Dry against dry, two grown men struggling in a two am haze. It happened again and again and again until it felt like too much time had gone by. Like this had been decades of time, overlapping like sheets of paper on a floor. 

“I don't love you.” 

“Who said anything about love? It's okay.” 

And it was. This was Adam, and he was right. This was right. It didn’t matter if there was any kind of love there. 

“I can't right now. I need to…”

But Lawrence couldn't exactly remember what he needed to do, he thought of daylight and unsaid promises in tiled rooms. He thought of bullet wounds and septic shock. He tried to ignore the unfamiliar feeling inside his own sweatpants, a heavy weight against his thigh and threatening to harden at any moment. He felt young. He felt whole. 

“Okay, lay with me?” It was posed as a question but there wasn't much choice given. It was his own home and this was somebody with no right to rule him. He found they danced with a sway of uncertainty between them until they weren’t in the living room anymore. He leaned on the walls of the hallway, his hair, thinning and dirty tangled between deft fingers. 

Lawrence eased himself onto his mattress, well worn and comfortable to his body. His blankets and pillows coated thick in his own years of single living. It had been weeks since he’d been here but it was easy to adapt again. 

Adam lay next to him, pulling his arm over his chest like a blanket. Neither said goodnight but the night came all the same. 

  
  



	4. Chapter 4

Morning smelled like coffee and when Lawrence opened his eyes he was only slightly confused. The after high of morphine rushed through his system coating his mouth again in cotton. It all faded so quickly that it didn’t seem real, nothing seemed real. Especially not the body that had been in the bed beside him only a few hours ago. 

A few hours ago…

A panic coursed through Lawrence’s body for a moment, old routines die hard as he understood it was a day off. Monday to Thursday he was off. Without kids or a family to worry about he was content to work the weekend shifts. He would work long hours. He would work holidays and special events just because being inside the hospital was more productive than ordering take out on Christmas day. Monday was his Friday. Thanksgiving was just an extra workday. He forced his jaw to unclench. 

He wanted to call out for Adam and yet felt like a child; foolish and silly for imaging him here again. He thought he was past that. Years of therapy sessions were supposed to fix this; fix him. He thought maybe he was finally on the upswing, without the unwanted mental medications clogging him his life and without the vivid hallucinations clogging up his senses. It only too him seconds to close his eyes and imagine the brown eyes from the night before looking back at him in the darkness as he understood he needed more time to mend himself back. 

His therapist, a young kid who sat in a chair with his legs folded up under him as he spewed snips of life advice - had suggested getting a dog. It would be something to motivate Lawrence to get up and out of bed in the mornings he didn’t have work. Lawrence had found for a long time after the divorce finalized that he had a problem getting up in the mornings. Afternoon and night time wasn’t much better. He found he became stagnant inside his mess of sheets on his bed. 

_ Something for you to look after; and to look after you.  Were the exact words.  Maybe a cat if you’d prefer. A little less commitment.  _

Lawrence had gone out and gotten a fish. It was the ideal amount of commitment. He had stood in front of the Wal-Mart fish tanks and pointed to a tank with one fat black monster of a suckerfish clinging to the glass all alone. It’s ugly mouth worked on unseen bacteria. 

_ Are you sure you want this one? _

Only thirty dollars later he was the proud owner of a disgusting fresh water creature that only got fed three times a week and sat in a bowl on his kitchen counter. He had night terrors about getting too attached to a pet only for it to be ripped away. A run away dog. A cat hit by a taxi downtown. A man creeping into his apartment and mixing poison into their food.This suckerfish wasn’t an emotional investment. 

It would be something to motivate him; as if child support payments and alimony wasn’t enough. Today was a feeding day and as Lawrence shuffled his way into his kitchen using doorknobs and the handy back of a chair wondering which of his neighbors was making coffee he found himself shocked back into a harsh reality. 

“This guy is really ugly.” Adam tapped on the glass, two extra large Dunkin Donut cups sat beside the tank. “I brought it back black with sugar and cream on the side. Wasn’t sure what you’d like.” Adam nodded towards the drinks and banged one calloused index finger against the glass again. The fish didn’t even acknowledge the intrusion into his day. His mouth opened and shut against the glass, mirroring the way Lawrence’s was. They do say pets and owners tend to look the same. 

He stopped when he understood what he was doing. Instead Lawrence grabbed one of the cups and allowed the warmth to seep into him; he was suddenly so cold he never thought he could get warm again. He shivered and shuddered and balanced himself against the countertop; wondering in the chaos of last night where his foot had gone off to. 

“‘Morning.” Adam said, never fully tearing away his gaze from the fish. He was fully dressed in baggy camo pants and a grey shirt with a few too little holes to be fashionable. 

“Are we going to talk about last night?” 

“Million dollar question.” Adam asked, his gaze still on the fish, stuck to the side of the bowl. “Would suck to be like a fish. Stuck in a bowl.” He said, filling the air with empty observations. 

“What was that about?”

“The fish?”

“Last night. Is that why you came here?”

“I dunno.” Adam said, still unable or unwilling to turn away and face the older man who was currently thumbing the lid of his coffee. “Not like a booty call or something.”

“Is that what you do?”

“What I do?” 

“For money.”

“For fucks sake Lawrence, you think I’m a hooker? Do I look like somebody people would pick up.” Finally Adam turns to face him, his own face a flush of reds and pinks. Inside his features is anger with a tinge of humiliation. Lawrence isn’t sure who people pick up on the street corners, but he has seen some questionable people on the streets late at night crawling into cars idling in no park zones. “You can just forget it if you want. I can leave, if that’s what would make you happy.” He turns his face to the ground. “Since it’s pretty obvious you don’t even know me.”

“What?” Lawrence feels like he’s flipped the switch on and he’s watching some silly drama on daytime TV while he pops pills and tries to detach himself from his brain. Only this time he’s inside the drama. He feels off balance and it’s not just his missing limb. 

“What you said last night, that you don’t know me.” As soon as Adam says the words Lawrence decides the path he’ll take is doubling down, not backing away. 

“Yeah, well I mean I don’t. Not really. How am I supposed to know you? I’ve known you for a much shorter time than you’ve known me. And if I remember what you said last night - you said it didn’t matter.” 

“It doesn't, you can know me. You can get to know me. You already know the important parts. You know I’m a shit bag of a person and you still let me sleep in your bed.” 

It’s hard to push admissions of guilt away but when they are as old as Adam’s it gets easier to look the other way.

“We are all shitty people.”

“Do you have work, am I holding you up?” Adam asked suddenly, the subject twisted around as he turned to face the fish. “What does he eat?” Adam waits for no answers, his fingers find a place on the glass again leaving ugly greasy fingerprints behind as he moves them in time with the fish’s motions. Lawrence finds himself wondering if Adam was ever really real - but those marks are proof. Even after his hands have been all over the other man’s body he finds himself looking for leftovers, remains. Evidence. Lawrence stops again as Adam’s words ring between his ears. 

_ He _ . In the months Lawrence has had this fish he’s only ever thought of it as an  _ it. _ There was no reason for a name or a personality or what it likes or didn’t like. No reason to think if it’s a boy or girl. 

“Flakes. In the cupboard.”

Adam turns and searches through two cupboards until he finds what he needs and uncaps the small tin. He sprinkles a pinch and a half into the top of the bowl. Lawrence wants to tell him it’s too much, but he doesn’t. The fish makes no movement, no indication to care about the floating bits in the water. 

“Do you want me to go or do you want me to stay?”

“Can you get my foot?” A question begets another and Adam sets the tin down on the countertop. 

“Where is it?” 

“Couch maybe?” Adam turns and looks, bends over and shuffles around until he finds the prosthetic shoved behind the recliner. He holds it without the kind of fear or disgust others might show. He hands it off as if it’s nothing at all. 

“Need help putting it on?” Is his only comment and Lawrence feels the bite of sarcasm bubbling inside of him like an angry parasite. He’s not sure why he’s suddenly upset, but Lawrence sets his own coffee back down onto the countertop and tries to ignore his inner voice. 

_ Yes, Adam, I always need somebody else to attach all my lost parts. I start every morning with an army of volunteers.  _ He swallows it down and allows his second thought to be birthed into the world.

“You’re not disgusted by it.” Which is also a wonder. 

“It’s part of you, why would I be disgusted?” 

“It’s not a part of me. It’s the broken part of me.” Lawrence can’t help that one from sneaking into the conversation. He eases himself into a modified wall sit position and brings his leg up, feeling himself sinking to the ground. He’s not as young as he was ten years ago when this wasn’t so hard. Every day it gets harder. 

“I did it.” Adam says, empty. 

“No I think I did this.” Lawrence looks up at Adam as his ass finally makes contact with the ground. His lips pull into a wicked kind of smile that he knows leaks of foul humor and makes a sawing motion at his ankle. Adam finally looks away. 

“You’ve gotten totally fucked up.”

“Oh, you knew me so well beforehand?” 

“No. I mean I’m not complaining. Some people need to adapt. It’s how it is.” Adam finds Lawrence’s eyes with his and holds the gaze for a little too long to be comfortable. 

“Is this flirting? Are you flirting with me?” Lawrence asks, his own mind not fully wrapped around the conversation. His foot attached he struggles to right himself, failing and allowing himself another minute to regroup his strength into his lower limbs. 

“I don’t know.”

“Are you attracted to me?” 

“I think so, I never really thought of myself as into older men. At all. Or men. Things are weird with you. This is weird.” 

Adam is right, this is weird and even with the truth out in the open Lawrence isn’t really shocked. There’s a part of something inside his stomach that twists and turns at the thought of Adam in his bed and it’s not horror or revulsion. It’s a sensation he thought didn’t have a home inside him anymore. It concerns him the way an abnormal X-ray might. 

“Yeah.” He agrees without agreeing to the feelings. He doesn’t want to admit them outloud just yet. It would make them too real too fast. It’s still a hard lump inside Lawrence’s throat to think of Adam as real, let alone something as inconcrete as feelings. “You know I do have work today.” It’s a spur of the moment decision. “You can stay here. Take a shower, do some online shopping. Eat something cooked in a microwave and not in a soup kitchen.” Lawrence struggles to his feet successfully his time. He sets his freshly attached part below him. He steadies himself and begins his walk back to the bedroom to change his clothes. 

“That’s very patronizing of you.” 

“You’re welcome.” 

“I didn’t say it was a good thing.” 

“Oh. Okay.” 


	5. Chapter 5

It’s hours later while Lawrence sits inside a hard plastic booth, chewing the end of a straw inside a McDonalds twenty miles away. He used an Uber to get out of walking distance, breaking his own rules about cars if only because he was afraid of spotting Adam on the streets and getting caught. 

The last thing he wants is for Adam to spot his weakness, to sense there is some kind of feeling there buried under his skin. He isn’t sure what it even is yet living there besides his blood and bones. It could be just a longing for physical contact that isn’t strictly business. It could be a smell in the air. It could be shared trauma making things blurry and forcing relationships when there should be nothing.

Even in his college days when he drank to pass out and decided to experiment with his Microbiology lab partner in his dorm room - he wouldn’t have been attracted to Adam. He wasn’t even attracted to his friend. It had been more a crime of opportunity. So why now, why him, why this? Why the urge to attack him and suck his skin between his teeth, pressing his lips into Adam’s windpipe until he stopped breathing altogether. 

Had Jigsaw finally won and turned him into the horrible monster he knew he could become? 

It wasn’t possible, there had to be some kind of trigger. Maybe it was all still a delusion and the thought of an imaginary friend was actually more of a comfort than the concern it should have brought with it. All the implications of mental illness were better met than an attraction to a man he’d once shot underground in a soundproof bathroom. He thought of dark dirty skin and a bleeding exit wound that poured crimson onto the tiles and felt his mouth salivating. 

Something about it was very, very wrong. He wondered if Adam thought of the same things. Got off while imagining the white of bone, the sick yellow of marrow leaking from a detached ankle. Maybe that was why he wasn’t disgusted with the prosthetic. Maybe that was why Lawrence let him stay in the first place, the feeling of scar tissue that was so very much  _ all his fault  _ twisted up underneath his fingertips. His hips ached in a strange way he thought he was far too old to feel. He wondered what his therapist might have said about this, then decided he would never have told his therapist about all this, even on his best mental health day. 

This wasn't just wrong, this was all very sick. 

_ Do no harm.  _

But enjoy what is already fucked? Lawrence searched inside his brain for a reason, an explanation. Childhood trauma or a lack of the proper chemicals inside his brain. He wondered if he could hire a hypnotist and find out if he was blocking any memories. It wouldn’t work, Lawrence was sure. Nothing was being blocked, simply put Adam  _ was  _ the painful memory. 

Lawrence was finally jostled out of his thoughts by the sound of a throat clearing. His face shot up, sure he'd been caught by Adam. With the plastic straw completely macerated inside his mouth he came face to face with a teenager fresh from high school. 

He was wearing a headset over dark red hair and he looked tired and nervous. 

“Sir, I’m sorry but you can only be in the lobby for an hour max and you've been here for three. If you'd like to buy something else you can stay but otherwise we'll have to ask you to please leave.” 

His name tag said manager but his attitude seemed scared as if he's never faced conflict. Lawrence was jealous. The hardest choices this child has probably ever had to make would be regarding his IPhone color. White? Rose gold? Black? The tough choices. 

It made him nostalgic for a time he’s never had. 

“Sorry, sorry.” Lawrence apologized quickly around the destroyed plastic. 

He stood and left. He had to go home eventually. 


	6. Chapter 6

Tacky 80’s synth boomed a little too loud as Lawrence opened the door to his newly pirated apartment.

_ I think we’re alone now // doesn't seem to be anyone around // I think we’re alone now // the beating of our hearts is the only sound _

“Hello?” Lawrence thinks the last time this song was popular was before he even went to college. He hasn’t heard it since then and with his migraine growing like a tumor he wishes he never had to hear it again. 

Adam moved into the frame of view, his socks slipping against the hardwood. One arm clutching the fishbowl as his hips rocked back and forth under thick grey sweatpants, two sizes too large and one leg worn much more than the other. Either it was a blissful ignorance or just plain willful ignorance - but he didn’t turn or answer Lawrence. 

“Hello?” He tried again. The bass seemed to grow louder, if only inside his own mind. Throbbing between his ears. It had been a long day of hiding from this little asshole. If he was honest he wasn’t tired. He was exhausted. Adam still didn’t turn, not even giving aware a head tilt to acknowledge the intrusion.  _ Are you fucking kidding me?  _ Lawrence wanted to throttle the little shit - but instead he heard a faint noise under the music. A monotone beeping. His phone.

“Hello?” His lips pressed to the Iphone as closely as he could. There it was on the other end. A voice he never heard anymore.

“Lawrence. It’s me.” 

Alison. 

The music doesn’t turn down - not a single decibel but yet it seems the tension in the room mounts. Lawrence can hear what she’s saying but he can’t very well process it. It seems like she’s a million miles away. Maybe she is. Adam’s head cocks even with the tacky song bouncing inside the walls loud enough to cause somebody to slam their fists against his floor. A muffled threat from below them. 

“I’ll be over as soon as I can.” 

The problem with Iphones is you can’t slam them down. There is no finality in the click of a button that signals nothing at all. Just a silence on the other end. Unless you end every phone call with a “fuck you” there isn’t anything you can do to show any kind of displeasure. Lawrence turned on his heels to leave before he even noticed the music was off. 

“I’m coming with you.” 

Lawrence turned back, facing Adam. Adam who stood in the doorway, fish now placed back on the tabletop, his dirty t-shirt and Lawrence’s own sweatpants hanging off his bony hips. 

“What.” It wasn’t even a question, just a statement of utter disbelief. Lawrence wanted to turn the clocks back to this hour three days ago and jump from the roof of this shithole before everything became more fucked up than the normal amount.  _ What _ was the only word that seemed to convey that meaning enough. 

“Alison. She called.”

“You couldn’t fucking hear me but you heard her?”

“She’s in trouble.”

“Was.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s him. It’s everything I was telling you about.” 

“Him?” 

“Fucking Jigsaw. I told you yesterday. The people around us are in trouble.” Adam’s voice raises in pitch just enough to convey that someplace inside of him he feels a mounting panic. Lawrence wants to punch him square in the jaw. He wants to hide the panic he’s feeling inside of himself. 

“You told me yesterday the people around you are in trouble. You never mentioned me in this.” Lawrence couldn’t help the bubbling rage that started to ebb into his vision. It wasn’t too late to jump off the roof if he went to the elevator and hit the 16th floor button. Then he would take the maintenance steps - 

“Lawrence are you stupid? Us. You got out of there too. Us. It’s an US problem.” Adam himself wasn’t really backing down. His voice elevated further and the people downstairs banged away. If Lawrence didn’t die tonight he might need to look for a new habitat. 

“Ah, gotcha.Thank you for clearing that all up for me. So your homeless friends get on a bus and go cross country for better tips and suddenly that explains why somebody broke into my ex wife’s house?” Adam stands taller and talks three steps to close the gap between himself and Lawrence. His eyes don’t waver. 

“It means I’m coming with you. I’ll sit low in the backseat. I won’t even get out of the car. I’ll be moral support.” Adam’s pants dip lower on his hips as his fingers play with the hem of his shirt. His teeth chew a nervous line into his lips. Lawrence isn’t sure if the pounding belongs to his downstairs neighbors or the blood inside his head. 

“I don’t drive.”

“Okay. So I’ll just keep the Uber company. Are you planning on staying over all night or something? I mean he’ll keep the motor running. Or better yet I can have him drive me around the block or something. I don’t know, but I want to go with you.” 


	7. Chapter 7

Adam waited exactly as he had promised, tucked away in the backseat of the Uber. 

“I should be out soon.” Lawrence had sworn to the driver - a young kid who probably was doing this to pay for college. Probably an art degree. Lawrence wanted to roll his eyes just thinking about it. Young people and their fucking dreams. After Lawrence and Adam had crawled into the back seat outside his shit hole apartment nobody spoke until they parked. After all, for what? Lawrence had nothing to say, Adam was just a passenger and the driver seemed like he was inside his own world only casually stealing glances into his rearview mirror at stoplights. 

Once Lawrence was shutting the door he looked back. Adam didn’t move an inch, just sat looking out the window as Lawrence waved and walked into the safety of the porch lit house, exiting the darkness. 

At the moment Lawrence was swallowed into the warm heat of the occupied house it was ten past one in the morning. The story went that sometime around eleven the security alarm near the front door was triggered. The cops came - Alison said. They looked everything over. It seemed like the person who broke in actually didn’t trip any alarms until they were leaving. Even then it seemed to be intentional, almost like somebody wanted the intrusion to be discovered. Nothing had been broken, no glass shattered, nothing was even missing. It was like somebody had come into the house, moving things around then up and left. 

Lawrence stood just a few inches inside the doorway, his eyes taking in the sight.

This was not his beautiful house. This was not his beautiful wife. This was not his beautiful life. 

When Lawrence had first crawled from the deepest depths with coagulated blood trailing behind him for what seemed like miles things were wonderful. Not the therapy, nor the further amputation - someplace mid calf so he could have a proper prosthetic fitted to him down the line. No, the newspapers were not wonderful with it’s slanted coverage and accusatory claims. Alison - she was wonderful. It was like a honeymoon all over again. 

She was always at his bedside, she held his hand while she stroked the thinning hair from his sweaty forehead. She kissed him freely and told him she loved him at least hourly. When he came home they shared a bed that had been nearly empty for years. And Diana, well she was never too far behind. There were drawings, hugs, kisses. She made him breakfast in bed and covered the kitchen in flour, still not putting enough in the pancakes to thicken them up. There were photos of the three of them, Alison pushing Lawrence in a wheelchair at Disneyland of all places. If Jigsaw didn’t think that was living then he had the wrong idea. 

Lawrence would claim he had no idea what flipped the switch from love to hate again; but he was excellent at lying to himself and it didn’t take a mastermind to understand what the real root of the problems were. He was still a cheater. Prior allegations don’t just up and disappear. Then of course there was the Tramadol. Tylenol with Codeine. Xanax. Ativan. Percocet. Morphine. 

For some reason Morphine was the line in the sand. Everything else was fine - even when Lawrence didn’t think it was fine himself. He would tell himself there was only one more refill before he stopped asking his close colleagues to write him another script. One more day of therapy would make him stronger, strong enough to stand on his own. But each and every day the time would pass and he’d still feel the pain inside of him. The ache in his bones, the screaming inside his mind. Most nights he woke up in cold sweats, his jaw clenching so tight it hurt to open his mouth smelling the acrid air of that sealed tomb. Sometimes he screamed. Sometimes he cried. Sometimes he was frozen in place and unable to move an inch. 

“Morphine. Really? How long have you been taking this?” Alison shook one of the bottles that had rolled out from behind a box of cereal in the kitchen. Of all places.

“Dunno.” Lawrence shook his head, his eyes counting the smallest details in the tile flooring. 

“Isn’t this a little extreme? Like on Intervention? Like on A&E? Are you writing your own scripts for this?” Her tone was harsh and Lawrence assumed he’d deserved it because maybe it was a little extreme. The questions didn’t stop coming. The answers were weak at best. Soon after this the honeymoon was over. The family vacations slowed to molasses then eventually ceased. Now they were girl trips with Alison and Di going out to the beach for a weekend. A day trip to an art museum. Shopping in the city all day and seeing a play in the evening. Then Lawrence had to go back to work after he relearned how to walk. Then he slept on the couch again. 

It was a sad, sad story told too many times by too many people. Too many lawyers, too many judges, too many small rooms with generic oak wooden tables and uncomfortable chairs. It almost didn’t seem like he had lived it at all, only heard about it from a friend of a friend of a friend. 

They mutually agreed Diana would be best with her mother, full time. Alison worked, but much less than Lawrence did. Lawrence and his small cramped apartment was no place for weekends and Christmas eve dinner with his daughter. She could never bring friends to sleep over. It wasn’t right to keep her locked up in a place that couldn’t even boast clean water. He saw her a few times a year. He sent cards and checks. He was still invited to school functions and anything extracurricular that demanded an audience. From the sidelines Lawrence watched Diana play soccer, tennis, basketball for one brief year. She ran track until she experienced severe cramps in her shoulders and had to stop. He paid for a physical therapist to stretch her arms and tell her to drink more water. He watched her play one of the Pink Ladies in Grease. He saw her in her bright blue homecoming gown, her boyfriend on the football team while they posed for photos in front of the school gym. He was an outsider inside what was his own life once. 

Lawrence worked weekends, holidays, nights and on call and wondered if Diana remembered him tucking her into bed. 

Now she stood with thick black mascara streaks down her red cheeks and she looked so much like the child he was desperate to save nearly ten years ago that he would mutilate himself for the chance to help her. Parenthood makes you crazy. What could he do? He limped further into the house, two lone cops lingering around and taking the last details of the story from Alison. As somebody who had been interviewed at length, he knew without her saying that this was probably the tenth time she had rehashed this story in the last hour. Her eyes met his as she nodded to him from over the shoulder of one of the men. 

“Officers.” He announced, walking past them to where Di stood on the stairs, holding herself around her upper arms, shaking. “It’s okay, D, it’s okay.” He reached out to her and it was only normal for her to come closer, accepting his open arms. She melted into him for a second and it as if the last ten years never happened at all. A girl needed a hug from her dad. It didn’t matter why. It didn’t matter when. Nothing mattered but the solid mass of his child inside his arms. 

“Larry.” Alison turned towards him, “This is detective Wilson. This is detective Dixon.” Lawrence gave a short wave towards the two of them from behind Diana’s back. She sobbed quietly for a second. 

“It’s just so scary, Dad. It’s like when I was younger.” Her words didn’t stop so much as trail off into a series of short hiccups. “Somebody was in here. What if they - “ She couldn’t finish as her breathing hitched inside her throat. She buried herself against Lawrence’s chest.  _ Goddamn it, when did my baby get so big.  _ He thought, holding her tighter and letting her dark makeup tears soak into his shirt. 


	8. Chapter 8

“Jesus fucking Christ. I thought you were going to stay in the car?” Lawrence couldn’t help the fright that leaked into his voice, nearly bumping into Adam in the darkness. Adam was standing just outside the front door, to the left of the massive picture window and smoking barely out of reach from the glow of the porch light. 

“Kid wouldn’t let me smoke in his car.” Adam was only a burning ember in the darkness, bobbing in time to his words. 

“First I don’t blame him. Second, you were supposed to stay in the car. Third you have to be so close to the house? I mean you’re still smoking? They’re going to smell you?” Lawrence’s voice is filled to accusations unspoken like  _ how can you do this? What will I tell me family if they see you?  _ Adam simply steps closer to the light until Lawrence can make out his features. 

“I didn’t stay in the car because I wanted to smoke. I guess I didn’t have to stay here but I wanted to stay out of the way. Do you honestly think they can smell me outside? All the way out here? Do you think it would freak them both out to see some random dude standing in their driveway at three am?” 

“Three am?” 

“Yeah. Did you not know?” Adam lets out a loud yawn, stretching his hands above his head and leaving the cigarette dangling from his lips. Smoke leaks from his nostrils as he shuts his eyes for a moment. “Also don’t fucking bother me. When you don’t have a bed to sleep in most nights you are allowed some kind of creature comfort.” 

  
“Don’t you think it would freak them out just as much to find random guy creeping around their house at three am?”

“It’s not the break in guy - I mean he knew what he was doing it seems like, enough to not stand outside and just smoke. ”

“What do you mean?”

‘I heard those two cops talking when they were leaving - about how the alarms weren’t even tripped until the guy was gone.” 

“What makes you think it was a guy? And they weren’t cops. They were detectives. Dixson and Wilson.” 

“Oohhhh.” Another loud exhale, smoke streams out from his newly tightened lips. “Sounds generic. Sounds fake.”

“Fake?” 

“Suspicious.” 

“How are they suspicious? And don’t leave that here, they don’t smoke and I won’t have them blaming me for ruining the lawn.” Adam stops mid throw and rubs his cigarette out against the bottom of his shoe, shoving the butt into his pocket. He makes a little huff inside his throat but doesn’t seem to put up any other resistance. 

“Okay, like don’t you think it’s a little weird? This whole thing? Alison and Diana are alone in there right? Does Alison have a boyfriend?”

“I think so,”

“And he’s not home? And somebody picks tonight to break into the house and move everything around? Like what one inch to the left? Who the hell does that?”

“I don’t - “

“Then they call 911 and what? You? Why not her boyfriend? What is he doing? He’s not here. Okay, so he’s not here and 911 doesn’t just send a cop they send two detectives in the middle of the week in the middle of the night. Not like a rookie night shift cop, like they wake up two detectives in the middle of the night? ‘Oh this girl’s alarm system is broken. Go check it out?’ How is that working?”

“Adam maybe because of me. Maybe they’re worried about - “

“The same things I’ve been talking about? Is that what you’re getting ? Oh it’s all legit coming from Mr. Brown and Mr. Pink but not me. I gotcha. I understand.”

“Adam, no. I’m not saying it like that. I’m saying maybe they are on alert - “

“Larry, who are you talking to?” Alison’s voice cuts into the darkness. Lawrence looks at Adam, who shuts his mouth and shakes his head slowly from side to side. Adam seems to hold his breath, his chest stilling as he steps back into the darkness and out of sight. 

“Nobody, just somebody from work called me. Sorry, Ali. I’ll be right in.” Larry turns back to the door for a second. He isn’t sure why it’s so critical that Adam is hiding just out of sight, but he needs to stay hidden. Something inside of Lawrence screams to keep Adam a secret in his back pocket for now. He flashes a quick warning glance over his shoulder. 

“Consider me gone.” Adam smiles, pointing back to the parked car in the driveway. “I’ll creep away when you go back in. See ya’ soon.”

_

The two are mostly silent again on the way back home. Initial coughs fill the air just to kill the voice. The driver looks exhausted with thick dark rings under his puffy eyes. He too doesn’t say much. Lawrence doesn’t expect him to but places a larger tip than planned on his phone for this kid. He hopes it’ll be spent on paintbrushes or a computer program to edit commercials. 

It’s not until they’re almost back at the city limits when Lawrence is struck with a question that seems so obvious he’s shocked he hasn’t spoken it out loud until this moment. 

“How do you know where I live?” 

“It’s on the app, return location.” The drive states factually. Lawrence is seized by the moment with the sun barely peeking over the slowly approaching towering metal buildings. Everything seems so crisp. 

“Sorry, not you.” The driver shuts his mouth after Lawrence’s comment, his eyes seem equal parts skeptical, concerned, and exhausted in the rearview mirror. 

“Larry, never forget what my occupation was. When you are a professional creep you can find anyone, especially when their life is public domain.” 

It’s not a nice answer, but it’s too truthful and real to feel like a scam and Lawrence spends the rest of the car ride in silence.


	9. Chapter 9

“Okay, so you gonna spill the beans? We were there all night.”

Lawrence shrugged his shoulders as he limped through the doorway, they had left in a hurry and the lights are still on from the night before. The blinds remain open and the early morning sunlight streams into the dingy apartment. 

“It’s too fucking bright in here.”

“Did anyone ever tell you that after you lost your foot you got a sailor’s mouth?”

“Shut the fuck up.” 

Adam walks past Lawrence. They are both ten years older than they used to be but Adam will always be younger, faster, stronger. _ Always _ . He shuts the blinds and flips the switch to dim the lamp next to the worn couch. Lawrence is exhausted. After his eventful day yesterday he got exactly zero hours of sleep - even if he did spend a chunk of it barely aware of what was even going on. Now it’s almost eight in the morning and all he wants is to fall into unconsciousness, forget anything ever happened. 

Alison and Diana just kept crying. It was endless but it was nice in a way too - nice to be needed like he used to. Alison was seeing somebody, another doctor, at least that’s what Lawrence had pulled out of her after what seemed like months of tears. This one was playing the good guy role of being in doctors without borders and was in some third world country giving flu shots to orphans with AIDS or some bullshit nonsense. What mattered is he wasn’t there and Lawrence could be.

“Somebody broke in and left no trace.” Lawrence huffs as he sits down, his eyes seem to itch and he feels every inch of his body ache against him. He sinks into the couch and grabs for a bottle, morphine, percocet, it could be a tylenol three at this point. His mouth waters and his good foot bounces up and down in a mock of nervousness. He isn’t sure what he’s nervous about. Adam has been inside his apartment long enough to scope out all the labels on all the bottles. Hiding the problem isn’t going to be manageable with this creep around. Adam doesn’t seem to notice or care. 

“Do you not think that is weird?” Adam asks, pacing around the small room. 

“No I do.” Lawrence swallows three percocet dry and all at once. He wants to throw up almost instantly. All that sits inside his stomach is pills and McDonalds. It rocks with anxiety. “It’s pretty weird. It has to be somebody she knows. Or her boyfriend knows. It has to be somebody close to the family.”

“Or…” Adam starts but Lawrence cuts him off.

“Number one Jigsaw is dead. Number two - Jigsaw doesn’t even know Alison’s new address? Or how to get into her home? Or the security code?” 

“Oh - no you’re right because that stopped him last time. I remember.” Adam bites back. “Jigsaw was a law abiding citizen of course until he got his goonies to kidnap people.”

Lawrence didn’t even want to say anything back, didn’t want to even talk to Adam right now. Didn’t even want to see him. Wished he had never opened his door and just passed out and ignored the pounding outside his door. His fingers searched the bottles on the coffee table for the bottle of Tramadol. He had to have something else to piggyback the Percs. 

“He’s dead. Jigsaw is dead.” Lawrence remembers repeating those words out loud again and again in front of the mirror, as his therapist had told him to. After a few times he doesn’t seem real. Not the words. Not the person. Not the death. “Adam I think I’m just going to go to bed okay? I’m not twenty. I can’t just stay up for days at a time on two Dunkin orders. This is my house, my wife we’re talking about. My family.”

“Ex-wife.” 

“Ex-wife still makes a family. That’s still my daughter. My child. You didn’t see her sobbing. Do you have any idea how traumatizing this was for all of us? For her?” 

“Oh, I can never imagine.” Adam turned on his heels, stopping one more time to throw daggers at Lawrence. “It’s not like I too was once held hostage. Not like I was shot or anything. Nope. None of that for me.” The fury in his eyes is scorching. Lawrence doesn’t look away. 

It wasn’t the same, Lawrence wanted to fight back and stand his ground. Didn’t want to let Adam get the final word, but he was too tired. He held the stare for a few seconds longer then caved into his body’s demands. His lids were heavy and the world seemed a little softer around the edges even as his calves ached and his stomach growled. He picked up a bottle of Tramadol and took two of those for good measure. They tasted sour on his dry tongue. 

“Can you just go to bed? Or stay up - I don’t care.” Lawrence brought his legs up onto the couch, too tired to even unhook his prosthetic, just tucking it under his good leg and flattening himself onto the soft cushions. He would hate himself in the morning - or more accurately in a few hours. The ache would be acute and the pressure of the false foot against his already worn skin would cause a blister or two. It didn’t matter now though, not really. All he wanted was to sleep and forget about this life. “I really could give less of a shit what you do. But I need to sleep.” 

And within seconds he did.


	10. Chapter 10

Adam was gone when he woke up and for a blissful moment it was like everything was fine. Something akin to being back to normal. A normal average Wednesday without his ex calling him for break ins. No daughter sobbing on his stained work shirts. No man he once pointed a loaded gun at and pulled the trigger pulling him around by an invisible thread. 

The feeling was nearly foreign to swing his legs over the edge of the couch;  **both** legs as he pushed himself up. It melded into the illusion of normalcy. For one second he was waking up eleven years ago - before his life went to hell. The illusion was shattered before it could be fully actualized. His head swam as he checked his phone. Of course he didn’t plug it in last night, or this morning, rather. It was less than 10 percent and the shocking brightness of the screen seared into his eyes. 

Too many missed calls, even one text is too many texts to pay attention to. This was odd. Nobody called him, nobody texted him. He was the classic lone wolf of the hospital. He no longer got drinks with interns, lunch with orthopedics, a round of golf with the administrator of the local nursing home. He worked, slept, ate and shit. Sometimes showering. That was it. No time to rub elbows with big wigs he couldn’t care about and that formerly well traveled road is a two way street. Nobody is going to text you if you don’t text them first. 

A few missed calls from Ali, a voice mail that starts with  _ Thank you so much for being here for us tonight.  _ A picture message from Diana. It’s their cat - Charles the third sitting on her bed, licking his paws. His whole name is something insane like Charles the Snickerdoodle captain. A call from a spam number. 

Then of course a text he doesn’t want to see, it’s only listed from  _ A  _ and he isn’t sure when that even went into his phone. It can only be one person, despite the nondescript nametag. 

_ Gone out. Be back. Don’t miss me too much.  _

No emojis like Diana. No long form paragraphs like Alison. Just short, sweet, to the point. It couldn’t be anyone else. It had to be Adam and in a way it cemented the idea that he was real - really real. 

How the fuck could somebody who sleeps on the streets afford a cell phone?

Every muscle ached in a way that was somehow sadly familiar as he sat on the couch and of course his calf ached in the way that predicted a pressure ulcer coming on sooner rather than later. He reached out and grabbed another bottle from the table, it didn’t even matter what it was anymore. The only thing that mattered was that it would slide down his dry throat, into his empty stomach and force his nervous system into a shut down. Power off. Hard reset. 

Four tablets later and he feels ready to text Adam back. He starts typing a message only to delete it before it’s finished. Finally he manages a short message that conveys exactly what he needs to say. 

_ How can you afford a cell phone?  _

It takes no more than ten seconds for his phone to beep again - Adam’s message. 

_ This is a track phone.  _

It solves a lot of unanswered questions, but asks a lot more. How can he pay for a track phone? Where did he get it? Where did he get Lawrence’s number? He wants to get answers but he also wants to leave his apartment, change his name and move out of state before his problems can come back. He texts Diana a smiley face emoji and decides to listen to all of Alison’s messages. He doesn’t let it soften his heart. He doesn’t bother to text Adam back, there is no reason. Sooner or later he’ll end up back in the apartment and they’ll be stuck looking at each other and not knowing what to say. Worse yet, Lawrence imagines, knowing what he does want to say. He knows thousands of words he wants to speak out loud rather than just twisting up inside his mind. He knows he’s not going to though. 

Graced for sleep for a few hours, it doesn’t seem to matter. A cloud of exhaustion lingers over his head. Lawrence is still teetering on the fence regarding his daily goals when he limps into the bathroom. Stuck someplace between wanting to move to work out the kinks inside his body and wanting to lay down again, turn on the TV and take off his foot. A thought of padding himself with gauze once a nice, cold refreshing shower is completed is all the push it takes to sway his mind. 

One of the things that people don’t tell you about missing a foot is that you have to sit down to shower. The human body, especially as you age, is not equipped to handle a man standing on one leg on a slippery tile floor. It’s really simple honestly, it makes sense when you think about it. Even with handle bars installed (they’re not) and non-skid mats on the floor to soak up extra water (he doesn’t have one) it wouldn’t really be possible without some human assistance or some third party stability. 

Before he unhooks himself, he turns around and walks back to his kitchen. The only things kept inside the refrigerator are take out containers, single use condiment packets, and alcohol. From these options it's a simple enough choice to make. 

The same people who don’t tell you about missing limbs and all the shit they cause down the line are the same people who bully men for drinking mixed drinks - Lawrence is sure of it. A good mixed drink is better than beer any day. Beer can be light, easy to gulp down but it doesn’t have the desired effect. At least not at first. Sure if you take enough pills it speeds it up but three beers might equal one strong mixed drink. So Lawrence has an assortment and choses a margarita in a can that will do the trick to his empty stomach. 

It’s flavored like mixed melon, but tastes like rubbing alcohol and goes down faster than he wants it to. He’s not even out of the kitchen before he turns on his aching heels and choses a second lime flavored margarita from the refrigerator. He pops the tab and this time waits until he gets to the bathroom before he starts swallowing big greedy gulps down his always dry throat. The bubbles tickle the inside of his nose. He doesn’t understand how he lived so long without these wonderful little pick me ups within walking distance at all times. 

Once the drink is finished, it’s placed on the edge of the sink and Lawrence chances looking into the mirror. The skin around his eyes dip too deeply into his face and seems to have turned an awful shade of purple. Exhausted forever are the two words that spring to mind looking at the age damaged skin. He feels like an ancient creature that lives inside a cave aware from humanity. It’s hard to not feel every line on his face. He skims one hand through his thinning hair and wonders how this happened, all of this. One day he was Lawrence Gordon and now? He’s not sure who he’s looking at. This man looks sad and pathetic and once he understands that he can no longer meet his mirrored eyes. 

There is a desire to bring a clenched fist up to the mirror. The desire to shatter the glass, crack knuckles, see blood drip into the sink. The only thing stopping him is the base understanding that this isn’t his home. This is not his bathroom. This is all a rental and this body is too. When Lawrence finally turns on the shower it seems surreal. It’s easy to stare a little too hard at the folding chair placed inside the tub. He hates himself in a way so deeply and viscerally he doesn’t want to breathe, wants to shut up and never speak. Maybe therapy would help - again. It’s easy to let his mind wander for a second while listening to the sound of brown water striking the metal, well rusted chair. If he used his insurance he’d have a lovely little plastic chair sitting there, white and clean with a hole the size of two fists under his ass. This is so that older people can be scrubbed clean by the aid that’s stuck with them. And of course for the shit to come through when you lose control of your bowels. That too. 

The sound is melodic in a way and he starts to float in the daze of pills and alcohol, reaching one shaky hand out to feel the downpour as the water starts to clear to a tan - never really crystal clear. He never really feels clear himself so it’s a fitting way to get clean he supposes as he strips naked. The last thing off is his foot, the off colored medical grade plastic. He knows there is foam, metal, plastic and all kinds of other materials involved in such a simple thing - but he wishes it were still made of flesh, bone and his own blood. He inches on one uneasy foot to the chair. He sits down, exhausted with the effort of movement and finds he’s returned to that awkward, ugly position of half in, half out. Sitting spread eagle, one foot planted on the ground and the useless stub of his other leg dangling over the edge before he brings that into the shower with him. He’s already soaked and leaves a puddle outside the tub where the water has dripped off him. Even without the mirror he hates himself. 

It’s a surreal thing when you know you’re fucked up. The numbness that shoots through you like a dull firework, blasting off inside your mind even as you know it doesn’t matter. He leans back into his chair, the chill of metal against his spine catching his breath inside his throat. The lukewarm heat of the water against his chest. The small bathroom spinning while the alcohol finally begins to catch up with him and he feels boneless. 

He shuts his eyes. 

When he opens them he’s on the tile floor feeling like he’s really - really far away. Not the tub floor, the real floor with the slick wet tiles behind him. But they’re not tiles, they're like cobblestones and he may as well be in the street. He may as well be a child for how he feels. Or a worm, limp and useless. He laughs. 

“What the actual fuck is your problem?” It’s Adam, just as wet but if it’s sweat or rain he’ll never know. 

“Can I have a beer?”

“I think you’ve had enough.” Adam sounds mad - absolutely pissed beyond words but Lawrence isn’t letting that slow him down. He’s found the perfect mix by accident and now he just gets to ride this dream out. “Are you trying to drown yourself?”

“How would I do that?” Lawrence feels like his lips aren’t moving all the way, they’re too much or not at all and he isn’t sure if he’s getting his message across. Adam’s face contorts like he’s going to yell something even though Lawrence wants to tell him that just because his lips are fucked up doesn’t mean his ears are. He can hear perfectly well - thank you very much. Then Adam does say something but Lawrence can’t hear what he’s saying because the water is too loud and it echos too much inside the tiny room that feels miles and miles wide now. 

Lawrence laughs and it bubbles from his stomach to his nose and feels good in a way he barely remembers. He doesn’t have many days like this where he feels fine. His fingers reach out without knowing what they are doing and find Adam’s chin under his touch. 

The skin to skin touch is electric like a whole lemon squeezing inside your mouth. He thinks if this is touch then taste must be magical and so he wraps his wet hand into those wild strands pulling the body above him down to the tiles to join him. 

When lips finally meet lips it’s like the first night, it’s all kinds of familiar while being wild and strange. It’s like tasting a candy you’ve only had once when you were a child. Later in life it does still taste good but you are too consumed with memories to enjoy it for what it is. He lets it all seep out with the water pooling on his floor and just lets it happen. He tastes cigarettes and soda and sour morning breath under it all that’s never been washed away with toothpaste. The yawning cavern of Adam’s mouth tastes like something he can never put his finger on and he leans into it for what seems like years until Adam fights back and pulls away like he’s been bitten. Lawrence has to stop for a second to see if he tastes blood.

“You’re fucked up.”

“So are you.” Lawrence retorts. 

“No - stop. Like you are under the influence of something.” Adam shakes his head almost angrily. “I have no idea what you took but I literally found you passed out in the shower. I pulled you out because I thought you were dead. Like honest to god dead.”

Lawrence shuts one eye in a way he’s hoping is reassurance while he pulls a finger gun move that doesn’t really work out. Adam is still too close and Lawrence understands too late that his hands are still behind Adam’s head so he never sees them.

“I’m fine.”

“Oh so you always take a nap in the chair in your shower?”

“That chair is for my leg.”

“Not what I asked.”

Lawrence smiles with all his teeth hoping it looks disarming. He attempts to lean forward to capture Adam’s mouth again but finds that he can’t anymore. His body seems stuck to the tiles below him and he laughs again, his stomach shaking with the effort of it all. He’s cold and it strikes him suddenly that he's completely naked. He can’t stop laughing until he feels some kind of self doubt in his own body. He thinks again of the word rental - this whole life is a rental. All put on without consent and he’s back to laughing. He can’t stop. On one hand Adam looks mad, on the other he looks concerned or at the very least unsure. 

“Are you okay?”

“Never been better. Can you help me up?” 

Lawrence tries to right himself again only to flatten out against the tiles. His aged skin sags behind him in a way that reminds him of a bag of liposuction waste. He is himself a bag of waste and he laughs even though it isn’t funny. Maybe if he makes it out of all of this he’ll get himself fixed up. A new face with a new body and a trip to an inpatient Rehab unit. He comes back into himself laughing so hard his head hits the floor with a dull thud as his saturated body escapes from Adam’s wet grasp.

“Fuck! You have to help me here.” 

Lawrence supposes he does because when his eyes open again he’s on his bed, behind him is a Lawrence shaped puddle of cool water staining the bare mattress. 

_ I have money - I don’t have to live like this.  _

But he does, at least in a way. He can’t get himself out of his own mind, not even for a minute. He knows he can live in a better apartment with running water and clean sheets at least; but what is the point? 

He sits up and looks down, he’s wearing a pair of green boxers, one sock, a white tee shirt with minimal stains. His stump is wrapped and aches like somebody came at him with a fire poker. It’s so clumsy but the meaning is well. He lifts it to examine the job, feeling the slight relief from the lack of his foot. 

“Hey.” Adam walks into the room, he hands Lawrence an extra large hot Dunkin cup and he just knows it’s exactly how he likes it. Black, hot, sweet. His damp hands bring the cup to his lips. He’s right. He takes a deep drink and wonders if one day he could get sober enough to think a good cup of coffee is enough. “ What was that about?”

Lawrence sighs, feels the air in and out of his lungs, the thrumming behind his eyes that always lives there. He isn’t sure what to say, something along the lines of  _ you’ve been in my house for two or three days and haven’t noticed I’m a terrible awful no good addict?  _

“I have a…” the word problem doesn’t come out easily. Admitting is the first step, but he isn’t sure if his weak leg is ready to take even that yet. Adam sits on the edge of the bed and drinks from his own cup.

“I know man, I know. Just like - I get it. It’s all a lot right now. With Alison and everything.”

“And you.” Lawrence can at least say that, admit that Adam is something, a factor inside his slowly rotting brain. 

“And me.” Adam smiles and it’s sad. It doesn’t say much but Lawrence takes another sip of deliciously hot coffee and starts to talk.

“I have thought about you since I left there. I thought about you in the hospital. I’ve thought about you while my life was falling apart. I’ve never let you get out of my mind. You’ve always haunted me.”

“But you never said anything.” Adam tilts his head to one side, his face puzzled, his coffee cooling between his fingers. This is all so hard but Lawrence struggles. Adam finds himself patient. 

“I didn’t. I was...ashamed I guess. I thought you were dead already.” Lawrence wants to let all his sins be absolved in this moment, wants to let everything wash away from him. Lawrence wants to tell Adam he felt guilt. Still feels guilt. He thought he had killed the man. “I only knew you for such a short time but I felt like we were connected. Somehow.” Adam laughs but it’s cold and empty. There isn’t anything inside the laugh. 

“I knew you much longer than you knew me.” Adam chuckles and it’s humorless and Lawrence isn’t sure what to say next. 

“I guess.” Lawrence feels like a child, hanging his head and trying to get through this. 

“It’s okay. We can talk ‘bout this some other time. Are you going to tell me what the hell I just saw in the bathroom?” His laughter dies off and Lawrence does look up at this point, he feels it’s only right to meet the eyes before him. 

“I don’t think I know what it was. I just wanted to take a shower.”

“Do you always do that?”

“No.” Lawrence shakes his head, struggling to find his eye contact again - admission of guilt after admission of guilt. “I don’t. I just, I take pills. I drink. I try to forget what my life is.” If this were a few years ago he might cry, might shed a tear or two and let them streak down his face like a starring role in a major motion picture. Instead he’s hard inside, shell after shell after shell. 

“You know you still have a job. You still have people who care about you. You still have a lot of work to do, Larry. Nothing is ever too late.” Adam finally brings his own cup to his lips, which curl in slight disgust. Clearly his drink isn’t quite right and Lawrence smiles. 

“What’d they do?”

“I ordered caramel and blueberry. This for sure tastes like a hot asshole.” They two laugh, loudly for the first time ever it seems. It seems something inside the room is broken, a too taut string holding them apart. “Here,” he shoves the cup closer to Lawrence’s lips who pulls away. “Try it please! I know you’ll taste the delicious ass flavoring.” 

“Don’t you think I’ve been through enough.” Lawrence brings up his hand and pushes away the cup, but not so hard to not be playful, not be joking. He feels weird. This all feels right in the strangest way. He doesn’t want it to stop - so they don’t. 


	11. Chapter 11

Simply put that’s how it goes for a while. Time is like water, always flowing. Easy to get lost inside. A few days turns into a week then two. Adam and Lawrence, Lawrence and Adam. Patterns emerge where there once were none. 

Adam is sitting in the tiny apartment, cooking and cleaning as best he can while Lawrence works weekends and long shifts overnights when they call him in. They talk a lot about all the things Lawrence hasn’t talked about in years. He discovers himself as a new person in the presence of Adam. They sleep in different rooms most nights and Lawrence can not remember if Adam ever does anything in the night other than get up for a glass of water or to pee - and yet he doesn’t forget the feeling of Adam’s fingers, his cool and calm skin. The shortest moments of lips touching each other. And even when it doesn’t leave his mind, there is no sequel to those few memory moments. They stay apart and that’s just fine, at least Lawrence tells himself. He’s too busy, he tells himself.

Once upon a time he was an oncologist. Now he’s just a doctor who works inside the ER. Doctor Gordon has no bedside manner to tell people they are dying anymore. His lips are too dry to tell them bad news - so he’s picked up all the shifts he can; splinting broken arms until orthopedics can see them in the AM, stabilizing M.I’s until cardiology is in, looking at stroke patients and playing god to decide if they get TPA or not. In some ways it reminds him of a time when he wasn’t Doctor Gordon exactly, but rather a student. Friends and doctorate hopefuls tagging together in cars to local hospitals to work as residents for shit pay just to see what they could. Car wrecks, accidents, burst bowels, missing limbs. A gaggle of friends sitting inside a bar in the lower east side after sixteen grueling hours and laughing because they just can’t believe they managed to save that little girl. It was before Alison, before the bathroom, before everything caught up with him and aged him hundreds of years. 

The nurses in the emergency room are much more bitter than on other floors. You work a few shifts pulling doubles short staffed in critical care and you become as jaded as Lawrence is. He tells them jump and it’s not like his oncology nurse practitioners; these nurses spit in his face and tell him if he was worth a damn he’d draw his own blood gasses himself. It turns out he likes them all enough for the most part and feels his own home away from home while at the hospital. 

Jenna and her growing baby bump - a due date in May, a baby shower coming up closer and closer and Lawrence with the means to buy out half her registry instead of showing his face in person. Angela and her drive to get a BSN before this hospital turns into a magnet and downgrades her to med surg. Jennifer who only likes to be Jennifer so she is never to be confused with the young Jenna. Jennifer has been here for longer than Lawrence has been practicing and is sure she was the first nurse the founders hired.The joke on the floor is that long after New York City is bombed to rubble Jennifer will be the one tending to the wounded. Then there is Dillion with his dreams of working in the OR, but there is never a position open when he applies. When Lawrence comes home he tells these to Adam who sits, cross legged on the couch and listens. There’s always a can of cold beer freshly open on the table, steaming hot pad tai from the place down the street that offers discounts if you pick it up in ten minutes or less. An ear waiting to hear his stories no matter what time of the day it is. It seems nice. It seems like it’s so nice it can’t be real. The two just keep going, day in and out again and again. 

Everything seems fine, until Lawrence gets a phone call at work and for some reason he’ll never understand, he picks it up.

“Lawrence Gordon.” He doesn’t need to say hello anymore. Either the person on the other end knows him or not and if not he’d like to cut the call as short as he can. 

“Doctor Goron.” The voice is deep, reassuring and ever so vaguely familiar. It’s an echo inside the inner ear that nibbles on a memory he can’t make out. 

“Yes?” Lawrence quirks an eye up and steps into an empty room - really more of a bay for trauma patients. He tries to place the voice but can’t and wants to ask directly but is sure if he just waits somebody will tell him more information unprompted. 

“This is detective Wilson.” Again the name seems familiar, but he can’t quite place it so he stays silent. His silence pays off quickly. “From your ex wife’s investigation. The break in.” 

“Oh.” The memory of that night washes over him. It seems like years ago already but he knows it wasn’t. It has been almost three weeks since that night, but still he’d assumed somebody from the case would call him sooner than this. After a few days when he had heard nothing he forgot about it all. He would text Ali once in a while to ask if she was safe, if everything was going well. She would reply with the same short texts in response to say yes, there were no more problems. Thank you for reaching out. We are okay. So Lawrence had assumed it was solved, or at least such a one off incident that it required no further follow up. “Hello, detective. I’m sorry - I was called in for an early shift and I just am a little preoccupied.” 

“Are you still working at the hospital? Saint Michaels?” The faceless voice responds. Lawrence can’t picture which one was which and he nods to the empty room before he remembers this man can’t see him.

“Yes, I am. Do you mind me asking what this is about?” Lawrence tries to keep his tone professional, but can’t help clip his words. If he were a suspect they would have followed him home, asked him questions that night or the next day. They would have been more interested in him; but they weren’t. This crime isn’t fresh inside his mind anymore - this is three weeks later. . 

“Well Alison Gordon’s home had that break in.”

“Three weeks ago.”

“Almost. I was wondering if I would be able to ask you some questions.”

“You are asking me questions.” Lawrence can see the ugly red glow of call bells from the rooms lighting the hall up like a Christmas display. The detective on the other end of the line simply chuckled. 

“I don’t take that to heart, doctor Gordon. If you don’t mind I was thinking in a more professional way.” Lawrence can hear the sneer inside his voice. “If you’d like I can come along when you’re off work or on a break. Or maybe you can come down to the sta - “

Before he can finish the word Lawrence knows he has to cut him off to take control back before it’s lost forever. 

“No that’s okay, we can meet someplace after my shift.” He turns inside the room, small, clean, sanitized so it has no trace of personality. The paper thin, one use bed sheets waiting for blood, pus and all kinds of fluids to junk them up and ruin them. “ I get off at six. I hope that’s not too late.”

“Oh - no of course. Six would be fine. Six thirty then so you have enough time? “

“Generous of you.” 

Another chuckle. “Of course. How about the Three Brothers? Down off south fifth street.” The distance pulls Lawrence’s rocking stomach into tight knots. He wants to throw up now, and isn’t sure why. He hasn’t done anything wrong but the idea of talking to a detective about a crime he doesn’t even know anything about makes him sick. Getting into a car and traveling any distance beforehand would make things even worse. 

“I don’t have a car, is there any way we can meet someplace closer? I can’t promise I’ll be able to get a cab at that time - end of the work day and all that.” 

“Sure, sure. “ The two decide on a deli two blocks north from the hospital. Lawrence watched the EMTs wheel in a trauma from bay 5 into room 12A, just next door to him. He can hear Jenna with her pristine white shoes squeaking down the narrow hall next to the liter; she’s yelling off the vitals she’s getting while her light green scrubs turn black with this man’s blood. Lawrence isn’t sure why he’s bleeding but he knows this detective better be comfortable with stains as he finally hangs up and limps out of one room into the next. 


	12. Chapter 12

Lawrence sits down at the table across from the man he can only somewhat remember. Not that it matters at this point - he’s downed more percocets than he would like and his hands still smell like copper. This; he knows, isn't a good look. His hands find purchase on the wood of the chair and pulls it towards the table, cornering himself. 

“Rough day at the office - sorry I’m late.” Lawrence smiles and hopes it looks charming but feels more like Jack Nicholson in the Shining. His fingers work mindlessly and nervously to play with a stain over his heart. Each beat it seems to move. “Obviously due to HIPPA I can’t be very descriptive - but boy when fingers meet wood chippers.” Here he shakes his head from side to side. He wonders if Adam is getting worried about him not coming home. In a different world there would have been a text exchange, but Lawrence still doesn’t like that. Doesn’t like the wired world always connected inside his pocket. It’s like being traced. Lawrence doesn’t want to laugh, but he does anyway. “Well you know - there’s no saving that. Looks like more and more cripples in this world every day, huh?” 

Detective Wilson just looks and doesn’t say much of anything. This second meeting shows he’s younger than first assumed. Maybe it had just been the casual interaction, but today he looks as if this must only be the first few years on the force. Lawrence allows himself to feel a little relief. He’s done nothing wrong, of course, but even an innocent man can be caught inside the skilled trap of a veteran investigator. He’s been down this path prior to Jigsaw’s death. It feels like traveling along a road lined with bombs. 

“I - Uh, ordered you a water. If you want anything else the guy should be back soon.” Lawrence feels the sick thrill of leaving the man speechless.Lawrence himself feels younger in a way, and almost maybe he’s just dropping some pounds. He’s a little more confident and struggles with himself if he wants to push harder - shooting a few more off color remarks about his bloody day, before finally deciding to hold back for now. Best not to risk his luck. 

“Oh - thank you. Of course.” Lawrence chuckles again. “So now what was all this about?”

“Alison Gordon. She experienced a break in to her home seventeen days ago - this is regarding that. Do you mind if I record this conversation? For work purposes.”

“Do you think I did something?” Lawrence is quick to reply as the waiter returns with two crystal glasses filled with the most clear, crisp water Lawrence has seen in years. Two perfect ice cubes float in each tall glass. 

“No, no, no. You were just on scene of course, you knew the victim. We’re just performing routine follow up.”

“Of course, sure. You can record that’s fine.” Lawrence takes a long sip of the cool water and feels it slide down his throat like it’s pure ice. He wonders if the man across from him understands he’s not even in the right state of mind for this. Lawrence Gordon has dipped too heavily into his supply. Detective Wilson pulls a thin black recorder from one concealed suit pocket and places it on the table between the two. He hits a red round button then begins again. 

“This is detective Ryan Wilson, it is six fifty one pm on Friday, September 25th. I am speaking with Doctor Lawrence Gordon regarding his ex-wife Alison Gordon’s home invasion on September 8th. Lawrence will verify for the record that you consent to this tape recording.”

“I consent” Lawrence says, “Will I need a lawyer present for our dinner tonight, officer?” 

“No, again this is more so informal questioning, doctor.” Titles used for distance, Lawrence eyes the man across from him. This want to be detective has been working for fewer years than Lawrence has been in the ER alone, he’s sure of it. They keep each other arms distance away. 

“Alright.” Lawrence smiles again.

“Can you tell me where you were on the night of September 7th and early morning of September 8th, please.”

“Well I spent most of my day running errands, I stopped at a McDonalds on Upper eight for dinner. I went home. After I got home I was there for maybe ten minutes tops when my phone rang.” Lawrence takes another sip from his water as the waiter returns. The ice is hypnotizing. 

“Have you made a choice gentlemen?” The unnamed waiter asks. Lawrence chuckles, his entree will be forever on the record. If he keeps laughing under his breath he knows if he wasn’t a suspect he will become one before he can blink his eyes. He decides to answer the question as quickly and painlessly as possible.

“Can I have the special of the day?”

“Would you like to know what it is?” The waiter asks, quirking up one eyebrow - questioning.

“No, thank you. It’ll be a surprise.” Lawrence faces the young man and smiles again, feeling this fake smile etch into his face today. He’s sure his face will hurt when he lays down to sleep. The price of reassurance. 

“And for you sir?” The waiter turns towards the detective, suited up without bloodstains on his chest. 

“Why not - the special as well. Surprises all around.” It’s his turn to smile and the young man wears it well, like a patronizing teacher grading a failing paper. Lawrence feels a tendril of jealousy curl inside him before he lets it go. “So your phone rang.” Wilson prompts as the waiter slinks away. 

“It was Ali - Alison. We’ve kept in contact, not closely but she always knows if she needs me I’ll come.”

“And so you did.” Lawrence looks at the glass of water, it seems fake, like a drawing made from a sharp pencil on silk and he feels himself drifting. He desperately wants to be sober, and he has been working on it - but at this moment it is so difficult. 

“Absolutely I did. I would do it again if she needed me. May I take a bathroom break?” 

“No, of course,” Wilson holds out one hand even while he pushes his chair away from the table, “I’ll let the recorder play so there are no breaks, if you don’t mind.”

“No, of course.” Lawrence mirrors Wilson, getting up from his seat and limping around the table, towards the single person restrooms in the back of the restaurant. When he said deli he thought of a counter but this was more Olive Garden than anything else. People in suits dining over a single red rose on a table. Candles flickering inside glass jars. It’s all too much over stimulation and he needs a minute. 

Inside the black on black on black bathroom the doctor crushes two extended release morphine tablets from his pocket before lining the mucous membranes of his mouth with them. It burns the way coke would. He thinks he’ll die sooner rather than later but he can’t wait for something with a duration of twelve hours to hit him. His body aches for it, needs it now - while he’s trying to look this kid in the face and tell him he’s innocent of everything. 

He is, of course. Lawrence just hates taking tests. He doesn’t rinse in mouth in fear of losing a single particle of the only thing getting him through this day. Maybe tomorrow he’ll try harder again, he thinks he has been doing good. Cutting back. But not today. 

The food is on the table by the time the older man gets back. The special is fish, some deep oven baked thing with a dark brown crispy skin. Mashed potatoes with the peels still on, clinging to the mush but only barely. Mixed vegetables without butter. Wilson has been waiting, the red eye of the recorder unblinking. 

“Where were we?” 


	13. Chapter 13

“Where were you?” Adam stands from his place on the couch. He looks anxious and worried like something is wrong. Really, really wrong. Lawrence isn’t sure what it can be but feels it’s all tied up in him. 

“Me?” Lawrence asks as if he’s walked in with ten other people and is shocked to be pointed out. He’s been trying comedy all night and nothing lands even close to the mark. Adam says nothing, just looks at him with his mouth shut tight, lips clamped into a thin line. Lawrence laughs. Adam rolls his eyes and it’s nearly audible. 

“How much did you take tonight?” Adam tilts his head to the side, his face a mask of disgust. “Thought we talked about this.”

“Didn’t know you were my dad.” Lawrence wants to pull off his shoes but at the same time the idea of touching himself  _ there  _ sends a shock wave through his body. No, the shoes will stay on for now. Adam remains silent. “Okay, I was out for dinner.”

“Hot date? Want some fries with that ketchup?”

“It’s blood. Thanks.” Lawrence loosens his tie in one swift motion, looping it over his neck and tossing it across the room. He unbuttons his shirt, the formerly crisp white now just wrinkles and stains. It’s ready for the trash. Once the thought crosses his mind he doesn’t give it a second to stew, rather he walks shirtless to the garbage can, dropping his shirt inside it. Adam doesn't act shocked which should be upsetting but it’s not. It’s just the icing on the top of the nightmare that has been this day. 

“Who’s?” Lawrence turns and Adam is closer than he thought he would be. His voice is low in his ear and that should have been a given but Lawrence isn’t really paying attention. Instead of looking angry, now Adam is just curious. This is the closest they’ve been since he was found passed out in the shower. Lawrence has the good sense to wonder why this always happens when he’s fucked up. 

“I can’t tell you that; but it’s from work. Some kid without fingers.” Adam gets closer and Lawrence looks down, maybe because of wearing it all day the blood has stained his sun deprived skin. Not deeply, but still the tint of crimson is there, faintly like an after thought.

“Should I be worried?” Adam reaches out, touching the place where Lawrence’s heart lies beating strongly and somehow much quicker under his red tinted skin. Adam’s fingers are cold like he’s been soaking them in ice all night and it sends a chill down the older man’s spine. 

“Only if you think I’m going to fuck my pateints.” 

“Some doctors do.” 

“Only on Pornhub.” 

“You’re so vanilla, who watches Pornhub anymore?” Adam laughs, pulling his fingers away quickly. “You’ll be shocked when you get your internet bill. Some over the sites I’ve seen...” Adam himself turns away, trailing off so he’s not facing Lawrence anymore before he asks again. “So hot date?” 

“That guy Wilson from Alison’s house.”

“Wilson?”

“Detective Wilson. Wanted to talk about that night.” Adam stops dead in his tracks. He still doesn’t turn to face Lawrence. It seems all the air is suddenly gone from the room. 

“What did you tell him?”

“What happened. I was out all day then got a call at night and went. I didn’t see or hear or know anything.” Lawrence walks to the fridge to pull out a can of Miller lite. Something stronger would land him on his ass. He pops the tab and takes a long pull before closing his eyes for a second. Adam stays silent. “What?”

“Did you have your lawyer there?” It’s cool and clipped. Business in a way Lawrence hasn’t heard Adam talk since he’s known him. It’s almost scary to hear something so unfamiliar from somebody he thought he knew well. 

“Why would I?”

“Did they record it?”

“Uh-huh.” He sips some more beer as he begins to walk to the couch, if he wasn’t seeing every color of the rainbow, feeling awfully tired right now he’d swear he’d ache. Maybe he would regret the interaction. Maybe even he would have lied to Adam. He just can’t find it in him to feel any kind of way at this point other than drained and high. 

“And you didn’t have a lawyer and you popped pills before you talked?”

“Adam, why the hell are you being like this? I had nothing to do with this. I told him the truth. We ate fish. That’s it.” 

“This isn’t good.” 

“Huh?” 

“Lawrence, when you get pulled in after weeks without questioning it’s not great. It’s not a good...look.” 

His phone buzzes, the mindless chirps pull him away from the conversation at hand. For the second time today he doesn’t look at the caller ID. One day he might learn his lesson. Instead he just hits the little green button that connects the call. He isn’t sure he can keep his eyes open that long to read the words anyway. 

“Hello.” It’s not a question more so a statement. A  _ what do you want _ to the caller.

“Lawrence? This is detective Wilson.”

“Oh - Mr. Wilson. Hello again.” He wants to say a hundred things to continue the banter but is interrupted quickly with words that stop the air inside his lungs. He feels Adam’s eyes glued to him as quickly as they can. His skin prickles under the gaze. 

“There’s been another break in. Alison asked if you would come.” 


	14. Chapter 14

Lawrence had tugged on a thin grey hoodie while Adam says he’ll stay home this time. Feed the fish. Take a shower. Something. Anything but come back to that big house in a gated community with a HOA and too many cop cars. Lawrence understands the sensation of never wanting to return; it’s like the home itself is a different planet. Too far away from their own reality. Which leaves Lawrence sitting alone in the back of an Uber feeling like he’s eaten rotten fruit. His stomach flips. He wishes he never took so many pills today, but under the stress he crushes two more morphine tables, sucking the powder from his finger after his gums burn with the hit.

He knows he’s done nothing wrong at all, he’s spent time at work, then with the cops, then home for less than ten minutes before he was called back out. If he was ever a suspect he should be totally cleared by now. This runs through his head again and again as if he really did do something wrong. As if there was a need to cover something up.  _ There isn’t.  _ Lawrence tells himself. 

The rage between a kind of unknown guilt besides outright concern for his family battle inside the foggy brain until the man who is terrified of cars is not even worried about being driven around for a change. He’s just so worried about this guilt. Feeling like he’s done something wrong even though he hasn’t. He decides to text Adam - just to feel like there’s somebody else in the world with him. 

_ Almost there.  _

He waits and waits and waits and nothing. Maybe he’s in the shower. Maybe he’s walking to the 24 hour grocer down the street. Maybe he’s asleep. Maybe he’s been killed. That last thought feels like a knife to the stomach, so it’s another text being sent in a matter of seconds. 

_ This is so weird. _

Not really eloquent but still something to get the ball rolling. Still nothing. He shoves the phone back into his pocket and looks out the window - the dark night sky. This is becoming another pattern - one he doesn’t care much for. His driver is playing something from a top 40 station and not making any conversation. That’s fine with him. He feels almost sober and wants his hits to hit the mark soon. He wants this to all be over finally. Shutting his eyes he pleas to whatever god is out there that he only needs ten seconds of sleep before he walks into a new hell. 

  
  


-

Alison was crying this time. With her tears falling freely and a blanket wrapped around her shoulders it was as if she was the one personally traumatized. Diana stood beside an ambulance, it’s lights flashing despite being empty. 

“Are you okay?” Lawrence made out, limping as best he could to Alison, sitting with her legs tucked under her in the backseat of a cop car, the lights off now that danger seemed to be avoided. It didn’t really matter, there was no reason for the lights other than to draw out neighbors to look. 

“Daddy.” Diana ran to Lawrence, wrapping her thin arms around his chest and catching him mid stride. It didn’t take much to knock him off balance. He rocked on his heels and righted himself as best he could, allowing himself to clutch her back. There had to be a better way to see his child, Lawrence thought. 

“Baby girl. Are you okay?” He hugs her tighter and feels those fatherly strings pulling inside his heart - things he had almost forgotten about before this. 

“We’re okay.” She composes herself quickly, a teenage girl with neighborhood eyes on her. She straightens up and looks from him to her mother, still sobbing softly on the backseat. “Mom’s really shaken up.”

“What happened?” Lawrence asks, he knows they’re within earshot but doesn’t care. If she would like to say something he’s sure she will. She stays quiet short of soft cries into her hands.

“Somebody broke in again, this time they did more.” Diana’s breathing hitching inside her throat and Lawrence isn’t sure if he can handle both of them crying at once. She’s still standing unnaturally straight, so at least he’s sure she’s not going to crumble. Before Lawrence can ask what  _ more  _ means, Wilson approaches across the clean cut lawn. He extends his hand, allowing Lawrence to take it out of pure reflex. Muscle memory of what a normal person should do. 

“Hello. Again.” Wilson hasn’t changed from his suit, doesn’t seem to have done anything but change locations. It’s like a giant hand plucked him from the table at the deli and placed him in this front yard instantly. A huge child playing dolls in a haphazard dollhouse. 

“Hello.” Lawrence says back, his grip is firm and he hopes it means he wants to know details. Wilson doesn’t say anything else so Lawrence feels he has to poke the beast. “Diana said they did more?” 

“They? Well we’re not sure who did it at this time, but yes.” Wilson shakes his head and the silence between the two is only broken by short soft sobs from the car close to them. 

“What did they do? Or he. Or she. What happened?” Lawrence asks firmly. Diana seems to flinch and curl inward on herself, get smaller.

“Well, they broke in again. They broke a few things. They - “

“Killed my cat. Daddy, they killed him.” Diana’s tears flow without sound and Lawrence wants to protect his only child with his life at this moment - but from who. Who can he fight for her? His eyes see only red and he wants to spin, spitting bullets at anyone who dared to scare his only girl. 

“They killed your cat?” He asks incredulously. Surely it’s some kind of message, this animal abuse. 

“Lawrence, can you come here please.” Wilson interjects. Lawrence wants to tell him no, he doesn’t want to move from this spot. He wants to hug his child and bring back a dead cat. He wants to make everything go away. Lawrence wants to wring whoever did this by the neck until they can’t be saved by even the world’s best doctors. 

“Of course.” 

The two men walk out of earshot, to the side of the house and that’s when the words flow.

“They didn’t just kill the cat, it was a mutilation.” 

The words can’t come from Lawrence’s mouth but it seems Wilson understands the wordlessness and leads him around the house, this time to the blackness of the backyard. Sure enough on the back porch. There, as promised is Charles. The full name long since forgotten in Lawrence’s mind. Horrified isn’t the right word. There aren't really any words.

Charles is missing his head. But again, missing might not be the correct word. Charles’ stomach is flayed open, his innards now outwards with the blood and goo of the inside of the animal coating the porch in a way that makes Lawrence’s shoes sticky - forever he thinks. There is his head, nestled safely inside the pocket of his own stomach, tucked under his heart and ribs and just above the end of his tail. He has no eyes. He is missing just his bottom left paw, seemingly sawed clean off in what seems to be mid calf, if that’s what it’s even called on cats.

He hopes the reason Alison is crying is because she found this and Diana didn’t have to see it. He prays to whatever he can think of that his former wife was the witness. Lawrence understands he shouldn’t throw up at a crime scene but the ugly churning feeling inside of his stomach rises to a crashing wave that takes him over. It’s all he can do to turn towards the woods behind the house and vomit, feeling every inch of his day rush through his body. He feels more sober than he has in years. 

Wilson, he’s saying things, like  _ it’s okay. Let’s get you cleaned up. Come back to the front with me.  _ He is also saying things like  _ the alarm wasn’t tripped until the intruder was leaving the house. It has to be somebody they know - nobody even heard the cat.  _ Wilson is saying a lot of things and Lawrence isn’t hearing much of it at all. He’s thinking about the cat’s eyes - wondering where they are. 


	15. Chapter 15

It is once again six in the morning when he finally makes it back to within walking distance of the apartment. It takes all the strength left in Lawrence’s body to call work, finally calling in after years of avoiding it. Working today seems like something beyond impossible - the idea of the blood and guts and bullet wounds. It sounds too close to suicide for his taste. He has nothing left inside of him to give to these people who need him. The Uber drops him off two blocks from his home and all that’s left to do is complete the walk as the sun comes up, lighting the world in thick blankets of red, orange, and pinks

_ Somebody they know.  _ It rings inside his head like a church bell and everything from his waist down screams in agony with every step, but stopping isn’t an option. It feels like a million pairs of eyes are watching him, he can’t stagger or falter. Lawrence refuses to stop. 

When he finally enters the apartment the lights are mostly off, the TV is playing and Adam is asleep, curled on the couch wearing one of Lawrence’s thick red flannels. His phone is clutched inside his hand as if he were mid call when sleep took him over. Lawrence wonders if he ever got the texts that were sent in the middle of the night. Wonders if Adam slept before that happened. 

Lawrence doesn’t want to wake him up, instead choosing to limp into the bedroom and lay down. He can’t even take off his shoes because there is no desire left. His arms are weakened to the point of uselessness and he feels if he were to keep his eyes open even for one more second he would die from the strain of it all. 

Through the fog of slumber he’s confused, but not enough to be ignorant of the sensations around him. There are fingers tugging at his shoes, his pants, his shirt. He feels those same greedy little hands stripping him bare but he’s still too tired. Too worn. He isn’t sure he’ll ever come back from this one. Lawrence begged Ali to leave the house, begged her to rent a hotel room or stay with her parents or go to a friend’s house and Alison - she refused even through the tears. 

_ I can’t let him turn my house into a goddamn battleground.  _ She sobbed and it rings inside his head like the closing line in a particularly good play. Where are Charlies’ eyes? He thinks to himself as he fades back and forth into the fog. The room is still dark when he cracks his eyes to thin slits but he can tell Adam’s shape in the blackness. 

“Just getting you more comfortable.” The shape says when he notices the older man isn’t all asleep anymore. Adam rolls him to his side, as if he’s had years of experience in this field. “Just close your eyes, you need to rest.” And he does. Shutting his eyes as if those words were all he needed and maybe it is. Reassurance. 

The next time he opens his eyes he feels another person beside him. Lawrence understands without moving that it’s Adam, laying next to him in the dark. It could be years they’ve been asleep. It could be forever. He wants to speak but he can’t. There is a sickness living inside his stomach. Lawrence understands the idea of a fever and in the moment it feels as if the liquid inside his eyes is boiling hot and threatening to seep out if he moves too much too fast. Inching towards the edge of the bed, the little black Iphone is both turned off and plugged into the charger on the nightstand. Both he presumes are Adam's doing. He doesn’t want to touch anything just yet. He needs to drink. Water, he wants. This is odd when his first waking thought isn’t usually anything but a warm, flat beer. 

It takes more than a few seconds but finally he has managed to twist himself into a sitting position and finds he’s without his foot. That’s okay, he doesn’t need it. Fashioning crutches from a chair beside his bed and an old cane tucked against the shuddered closet doors. It essentially works the same - it will be an easy trip, to the kitchen and back. Once he’s made it onto his single wobbling foot it’s time to release the deep inhale he didn’t know he had been holding onto. That starts the process of inching slowly and carefully from the bedroom to the hallway. The kitchen is almost within reach. 

The blinds are open and it’s dark outside and Lawrence, who is accustomed to swinging his shifts understands that his sleeping pattern is becoming so mangled he can’t return it to normal. He’s too old for that. 

He wants to just make it to the sink so he can dip his mouth into the cool tap water that is waiting for him. A moment of distraction, spotting a tan edge under some mail on the table by the door. Water first, then the mail. Water first. He makes it to the tap and allows the water to run for almost a minute, watching the calming water it circles the drain. The sound echoes back at him. He dips his face into the waterfall and lets it flood his mouth. It’s too good, almost like a dream. If this was a dream he wouldn’t be leaning on a chair, he thinks as laughter bubbles inside his mouth. Water drips from his lips down his bare neck to rest against his naked chest. He is still so tired but the curiosity eats him. 

He inches himself over what seems like hours to the edge of the kitchen, then the front door. Closer and closer still until the water is a distant memory, this moment feeling more like a nightmare. Dread inside his stomach where there should be nothing. Why is he so upset with just an envelope? It is not special in any way, just the edge of a tan packing envelope peeking at him from under another bill. 

Lawrence reaches one unsteady hand out to touch it. Once when he makes contact he half assumes it’ll dissolve into the air, whispering away like smoke. It doesn’t. It doesn’t move so much as an inch, a testament to it’s space based in reality. Lawrence brings it out, bills and junk mail fluttering to the floor. He can pick them up sometime when he can bend. Not now. There is no return address on this package. There is actually no regular address either. Nothing really addressed to Lawrence and for a second he thinks it could be mail for Adam. 

He shakes the idea from his head. Nobody knows Adam is alive, let alone here. Do homeless people communicate by letter? It seems ineffective at best if you have no home to send them to. It would be untraceable. Lawrence stops himself from thinking too deeply unsure when suspicion crept into his head. 

He tugs at one corner of the thick brown envelope, not stopping until it flaps open reluctantly. It’s too oddly shaped to be a letter, unless there is something with the letter. The top finally ripped open the doctor feels his stomach jilted and nervous. He looks inside and finds it looking back at him.

Two perfectly round green eyes. Cat eyes pierce him from the bottom of a bubble wrapped envelope. There is no blood, only the thick chords of optic nerves sitting behind them, laying dormant inside the package. 

Lawrence can’t see anything but his daughter’s cat’s eyes. Then he can’t see anything at all.


	16. Chapter 16

He wakes up feeling cool hands on his warm neck. He shuts his eyes in protest to being alive. 

The next time he wakes up he feels sick. It’s all he can do to roll onto one side, vomiting onto the floor. He hasn’t even rolled to his back before his eyes are shut. Lawrence is drenched in pools of sweat. 

He opens his eyes and sees day to night and night to day inside his bedroom from a dirty window. Sometimes there is a feeling of a body beside his own. It melds into the mattress. Before the moment can be savored it’s gone. Before Lawrence understands he’s alone it’s back. The wandering corpse. There is a phone ringing someplace, people talking, nothing, TV static, a dog barks, a cat meows while a fat tail flickers past his face and he swears his nose itches with allergies. 

It can’t be. 

He wakes up just a couple of hours shy of being under for two full days and feels like he’s finally getting back to himself. Adam seems relieved, sitting on the edge of the bed like he’d been perched there the whole time. His smile lights up the room with it’s depth and honesty. 

“Welcome back riders! I called off for you. I told them you were sick.” He rubs his face, five o’ clock shadow decorates his youthful face. 

“You what?” Lawrence still doesn’t feel  _ all _ himself, but he still feels something and it’s concerning. He feels sick inside of his body, like he’s got the flu or maybe some nasty respiratory disease. Something that’s draining him with every second his eyes stay open.

“You had a fever of like one hundred and four. When I found you, you were literally passed out on the floor right next to the bed, without your foot. So like - I don’t even know how that one happened.” Adam runs his hands over his eyes, squelching them under his fists. Lawrence doesn’t care where he was. 

“Where are the cat eyes?” Lawrence can’t clear those crystal clear green orbs from his mind, inside his shaking hand inside the midnight colored room. He never touched them - he thinks. But maybe he did. He thinks of them inside his palm. It’s a feeling you don’t forget, but can not possibly imagine without the experience. 

“Cat eyes?” Adam asks, his own eyes confused as his hands lower to the top of Lawrence’s covers. He mindlessly pats the blanket. His cool hand reaches to feel for Lawrence’s forehead. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Maybe he says it just a touch too fast, but Lawrence quirks his head. Too quickly, maybe. He allows Adam to make contact before the hand is removed. 

“Charlie’s eyes.” Lawrence tries again, shaking the doubt from his mind. What would Adam possibly do with cat eyes? A thought suddenly floats into his mind. “Jigsaw.” 

“I’m missing something.” Adam says, inching higher on the bed so he’s closer to Lawrence who tries to prop himself up. He’s only in a tank top and his shorts. He feels warm under the covers but when he moves the sheets he’s freezing. He sweats in silence under the blanket. Beads of salt form on his forehead but he can’t bring his hands up to wipe them away. 

“This is just like what you were telling me about. Jigsaw. Who else could it be?”

“Like you said, yourself Lawrence. Jigsaw is dead.” Adam sighs, he almost seems like he believes it. He sounds resigned. He hangs his head for a second, almost trapped inside his own conflicting disbelief. “I’m guessing they still don’t know who broke into her house?” 

“You told me.” Lawrence shakes a fist under the sheets pushing his line of thought forward. “You said. You told me about your missing friends. Who else would pick me. Pick us? Who would go after Alison. She’s a bitch but she has nobody who would do this. She has soccer mom enemies - not sociopaths.” 

“Do what? Break in? It’s awful, Larry and I promise you I feel bad for her and you but if nothing is happening then maybe she dated some fucked up guy between you and this new one? You haven’t really told me what changed this last time around. You just came home and went to sleep. Never even woke me up. I told you I found you on the floor. So please enlighten me if this is different from the last time when nothing at all happened and we sat outside her house for hours because somebody was just a creep?”

Lawrence isn’t sure where to start. Is it the first bizarre breakin that Adam never received the full story of. He knows he kept some details hidden away but still can’t remember why. It seems too late to talk about news that old. Or maybe he should mention the odd detectives who seem too close to Lawrence. The fact that since the other late lunch Lawrence has felt watched. Maybe it’s the second break in, the one with broken glass and a dead cat. He decides that’s as good a time as any and spills the story. The broken home alarms tripped too late to catch the criminal. The cat with it’s head in stomach acid and the way it looks at him without looking until he can look back inside his own apartment. He remembers the painful trek to the front door, the kitchen. 

“So you’re saying Jigsaw cut out your daughter’s pet’s eyes and sent them to our apartment?” Adam sounds a few steps past incredulous but at least he listened to the whole sordid tale. 

Something inside of Lawrence’s sick brain takes notice of the word our. Our apartment. Not Lawrence’s. Not anymore. This is not the time to fight so he pushes forward. Bigger fish to fry rather than ownership. 

“Maybe some henchman.” Lawrence feels his aching throat so dry it hurts. Adam laughs. 

“A henchman?” Adam actually stutters getting the word to pass his lips. “Who has those? Right now? That isn’t in an Austin Powers movie is it? If it is, I'm missing all the fun shagging.”

“Fucking Christ.” Lawrence wants to lay back down and forget he opened his mouth. He rolls his eyes to the back of his head in frustration. 

“No - no I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to be so mean.” 

“You are the one who started this shit. I was fine. Then you said your friends were getting grabbed up by Jigsaw. I said no. You said yes. Now my wife was attacked, my daughter. Somebody sent me those eyes.”

“Ex. Ex wife. You didn’t tell me she was attacked?” Lawrence sighs, it is not the point. The point is the attack is personal. He opens his eyes to stare at Adam from his place in the bed, feeling like a petulant child but knowing he’s right. 

“I should have said targeted or something. Nothing physically happened to her. Does it matter? Are you sure that part is really the most important thing out of everything that I just told you?”

“Where are the eyes?” Adam asks. A question for a question. If Lawrence knew where they were now he wouldn't have asked first in the first place. All he can do is supplement what he does know. 

“They were in a packing envelope. It was tan. It was by the door.” Lawrence feels the air inside his lungs start to dissipate. Where are the eyes? Did Adam not see them? Where could they have gone? There were two fat round eyes. It was like a hairball. He had to have dropped everything on the ground when he fell. 

“I haven’t seen anything like that.” Adam says, deadpan. He looks at the door to the bedroom, as if waiting for somebody to bring them to him, placed delicately on a silver platter. “I found you by the bed, you didn’t even make it into the hallway let alone the kitchen.” Adam tells his story again and Lawrence sees the chair he can swear he used as a crutch next to the bed, exactly where it should have been. The cane is set against the closet. Nothing happens and Lawrence feels his eyes prick. “Do you think you could have seen something?” 

Insane. That was what they called him for a long time. Insane. He’d made things up. He’d done everything himself. They told him that he had been the conductor of this bizarre three part act of home invasion, Jigsaw trap, eventual murder inside a bathroom he couldn’t pinpoint to investigators no matter how hard he tried. They gave him medications to quell the paranoia they said he had. They. The great mysterious they. They were not always wrong. He saw people, had conversations with the dead, the dying. He’d spoken to Adam when Adam was still a memory inside the bathroom - locked and sealed inside a tomb underground. He woke up screaming in the middle of the night with night terrors so real that Alison - who had wanted a loaded gun in the bedroom for emergencies - decided to lock that same gun up. Only she knew the safe code. 

Then his life fell apart further. Then he stopped those medications. Now in his sickness he second guesses himself. Maybe after all this time of struggling they were right. The only thing that makes him doubt this theory at all is the feeling. Those eyes inside his hands. Bloody. Real. Round between his fingers. 

No. 

He never touched them. He only saw them. 

“I could have.” He decides suddenly, consenting. It doesn’t feel like giving up but rather concealing something. “I guess I must have been really sick.” He can still taste the water, thick and metallic from the tap inside his cotton coated throat. The way the tan caught his eye. The feeling of the wooden chair back digging unders his arm, deep into his armpit. “Can I have a glass of water? Please.” Lawrence asks, an idea coming to his head. 

“Absolutely.” Adam doesn’t waste a second getting up. He’s through the open door in a second on his way to the kitchen in search of the perfect drink, the perfect glass of water. Lawrence feels under his arm, his left side beside his ribs. It’s tender. When he looks under his shirt there is a bruise where a chair might have once pressed against the soft skin. 


	17. Chapter 17

Things get harder then for some reason that nobody can put a finger on. Lawrence rebounds quickly and the two decide it must partially have been shock; that whole mess of a night and the days that followed. It is October after all. He had been walking around outside with those cops for hours. He felt the chill inside his bones. He has waited in the wind and the dark beside the car with Alison and Diana. It was too cold for an old man to be out without a coat. A man with injuries. What haunts him is the night he came back, the early morning actually. Seeing those eyes. He knows he was in the kitchen, near the door. There was an envelop, that much could never have been made up. Lawrence wonders why Adam has to lie. What does he have to lie about? He watches Adam a little more closely. It doesn’t seem like Adam notices anything amiss and the days keep ticking by one at a time as always. 

Wilson calls him only five days after  _ this _ break in. 

“I don’t feel I need to ask you where you were, not really. You were with me for dinner.”

Gaps. Lawrence thinks but doesn’t speak it out loud. Stopgaps. There were times between here and there. Times from dinner to home. How much time had passed before he got home. It’s hard to remember much of that night after the power permitted his brain inside the bathroom during his informal interview. He thinks of Adam questioning where he was. He thinks of blood. Missing fingers. Missing eyes. Where was Adam while he was eating fish and percocet inside a deli in downtown Manhattan? 

He doesn’t really want to think about it. The idea of Adam being the enemy is confusing, not to mention dangerous. It could lead down a destructive path that he’d rather just avoid entirely. Lawrence wants to let go of all these painful memories but his days continue on and on and on. They have his fingerprints at the crime scene, but they have a lot of prints. Everyone understands they’re left overs from the last time there was a break in - not too long ago. He is not suspicious. He takes fewer percocet and answers questions directly. He tells no one about Adam. No one knows about Jigsaw. No one knows much about what Lawrence is like when he hangs up the phone with the investigators. 

Lawrence asks Alison when her new doctor is coming back and she has no answer. It was supposed to be by Thanksgiving but with that looming closer and closer it looks less likely. Alison and Diana and a big house without safety. Lawrence wants them to move and will help foot the bill if he has to. 

He laughs at the unintended pun. He foots a lot these days. It’s unspoken but understood that Alison’s doctor will help pay as well. Lawrence has known Alison for half of his lifetime and is sure what she is doing. She is dramatic but would rather keep the kindling for a future fire, which is probably the reason she never upgraded her security system. It’s probably why she didn’t demand her new man to come home at once. Lawrence isn’t the only person who can tell half truths.

“Do you like mom’s new boyfriend?” He asks Diana in a rare phone call one day. Diana sighs.

“I guess he’s okay. I mean he’s never really around. He’s fine.” He lets that topic drop. It’s not worth keeping it up because he knows Diana enough to know she’ll just shut down. One word answers will come soon enough and that will be that. No further digging. “Why do you wanna know so much about him?” 

“No reason, just making conversation.” Lawrence limps around his apartment like a caged tiger. He doesn’t feel like one question is  _ so much _ about him but she’s also still only a teenager and two words is usually too much when it comes to things she doesn’t want to speak about. 

Adam hangs around the apartment less and less it seems. He comes home with torn pages from the newspaper, locking himself up in a tiny closet that seems like it wouldn’t fit anything. Lawrence finds the few things from that closet shoved in the already too narrow hallway, blocking his path with shoe boxes and photo albums he never looks at. 

“You do know I’m crippled? Right? Occasionally I walk with one leg in the morning? I hop sometimes if I have to piss in the middle of the night.” 

“Thought you slept on the couch.” Adam’s words don’t seem overly cold but the meaning is there all the same. 

Starting that night Lawrence resumes sleeping on the couch. Ever since he’d been so sick it seemed like the new pattern for him to crawl into the bed, if only to sleep in it totally alone with all the lights off. Adam doesn’t even go into the bedroom sometimes, just flickers the light on in that tiny closet and locks himself up like a prisoner. Lawrence wants to take notes but thinks he’s the one being stupid. The police station has an anonymous tip line. One day for laughs he calls it from what he thinks is the only pay phone left in all of New York, just outside a 7/11 five blocks from the hospital. 

“I think I know of another survivor of a Jigsaw trap. His name is Adam. I have reason to believe he’s homeless now and living under the radar and may be dangerous.”

The operator who sounds like a middle aged woman overly tired of her day job asks follow up questions that make too much sense and do matter but Lawrence gets tired of himself. 

“Where is he known to frequent? Does he have a last name? What makes him suspicious? Is there any way we can get in contact with him?”

Yes it all makes sense but it’s too much work and Lawrence hangs up the phone mid way through another wonderful question. He doesn’t call the tip line again, but thinks of the woman he’s named Florence on the other end ripping up her notepad with the words Jigsaw, Adam and maybe a question mark between the two. Lawrence pretends things are okay. 

“Can we talk about this?” He asks one night. It’s November, now. Halloween has come and gone. The end of the year rushing up like a tidal wave to meet them. It’s raining. It's dark. It’s cold all the time. The days are too short and the nights are too long and if nothing else he’s so tired. “Everything seems so weird right now.” Adam’s growing his hair out. Maybe it’s a fashion choice, maybe it’s a lack of desire to go out and get it cut. The dark strands hang loose around his face, escaping a choppy looking ponytail tacked to the back of his head. Adam’s drinking a beer with his bare feet tucked under him on the couch. He seems a far cry from the person Lawrence knew ten years ago. The younger man looks at Lawrence and nods his head. 

“What do you wanna talk about?”

“Since that night, with the second break in, things feel weird.” Lawrence doesn’t know what else to say. He has no more words that are overly eloquent, nothing so smooth and straight to the point. Just weird. It’s all weird. Every part of this. Adam nods his head, the strands shake around his cheeks - Lawrence finds himself surprised by the admission of oddness. 

“Yeah I guess it does feel weird.” That’s enough to leave Lawrence without any other words. 

“Yeah.”

“Anything else you want to say?” Adam asks, sipping his beer. His eyes seem judgmental. Lawrence wants to haul off and swing at him. 

“Okay - yeah I guess there is. You came here, forever ago. You tell me all this shit, like all this shit that I never needed to know. About your friends. And Jigsaw. You said Jigsaw was alive, or he had colleagues.” After the mocking Lawrence received on his previous word choices he is sure he’ll never use the word henchmen again. “You make yourself at home, okay - that’s fine. But what is the goal? You wanted help with Jigsaw and we just let that one go huh? Never really talked about that anymore and when I got worried and started to talk about it you back off.” Lawrence is feeling like he’s on fire. He’s on a roll. He can’t stop now if he wanted to. “So what is the goal, Adam? You want a place to stay? I don’t need a room mate. This isn’t community college. You aren’t paying rent. Are we friends? Are we more than friends? We barely talk anymore. Sometimes I feel like you want something else from me. When I tried that route you shut me down. You come in and lock yourself up and it’s just weird. All of this.” Lawrence waves a hand around his apartment. Adam sits quietly listening to the rant. His fingers play with one long strand of hair that he tucks behind his ear only for it to slip away in a matter of seconds “I am too old for this shit.” 

“Okay, I’m sorry. We can talk more. I don’t mean to be distant. I just. I don’t know what else to say or do.” Adam puts his drink down on the coffee table, he doesn’t change his position though. He stays casual despite the firing squad that Lawrence just unleashed. “When I first came here I didn't know what I was looking for. Maybe friendship? Maybe - if I’m being honest - a therapist? I know that’s not right but I felt targeted and I thought you would be able to understand.”

“I do. If I didn’t then I do now.” Lawrence says and Adam nods again, always in the right places like the cues inside a script he’s learned by heart. Adam continues after a heartbeat of silence. 

“So things changed, and I still don’t know what  _ we _ are. I mean I don’t need a relationship, but a friend would be nice.” Adam says, his shoulders shrug in a way that appears to not care one way or another. Lawrence feels irritation grating on him but he doesn’t speak. “But when everything happened to your family I felt displaced? I felt like I didn’t belong here and I should support you and them, but I thought inside myself like I brought this to them. You were okay before I got here so I tried to pull away. Maybe if I ignored it all and pretended it wasn’t happening then maybe it wouldn’t happen?”

“That doesn’t make sense. You are the one who started with - “ 

“I know. I’m saying I feel guilty. I know things weren’t great before I turned up but they weren’t like this. Everyone was miserable but safe. I go out and feel no more or less safe than any other day. I’m looking over my shoulder, but nobody is there. I don’t even feel the eyes anymore. I feel like I put the target from me to you.”

“To my family.”

“Exactly.” Adam agrees, picking up his beer again. Lawrence thinks he needs one for this conversation and turns to get on from the refrigerator. “I feel like I did this.” Comes the small voice from behind him. 

“If you’re right, if Jigsaw was after survivors for - whatever.” Lawrence sighs again, feeling like that’s half of all his conversations, sighs and eye rolls. “Then he would be coming for me sooner or later. You had nothing to do with it.” 

“Maybe later. Maybe never.” 

‘It’s been ten years, Adam. How much later until his friends can’t do it anymore? How long will they hand down what he wants to do? Look at me. I know I’ve been...a little better, but I’m not on track to live another thirty years.” 

“I honestly don’t know. I don’t know what he has planned, what he put into the works.” Adam shudders and Lawrence struggles not too as well. At least this is what he wanted, the words to come and go between the two. It feels helpful in some ways. Communication is key, a much younger man sitting inside his overly decorated office told Lawrence once. Without communication you have nothing. It’s taken years but Lawrence is finally able to understand that. Adam continues where he left off. “That’s part of what scares me. What is he able to do? He’s dead, right? Who the hell follows orders this long from a dead man. There’s no reason because there should be no retaliation if this person stops. Unless there’s more than one. Unless it’s something else...” Adam breathes life into Lawrence’s fears. One psychopath was enough for him but the idea of more with the same twisted ideas of salvation. He attempts to swallow his own saliva and finds he has none left. 

“I’m just worried. I just - things are so insane. I can’t stand for it to be insane in here too. This needs to be a hub.” Lawrence drinks deeply. He finds the beer doesn't hit him as hard or fast without extra assistance in pill or table form. He swallows and lets the words linger in the air. Adam nods in agreement when Lawrence meets his face from across the small room.

“Okay. I’ll be open again. I’m sorry. It’s just hard when you never had much then it all goes to hell and now I’m dragging you down too. It makes me feeling like I fucked everything up. I can handle that for myself, but not for you. Not for Alison and D -”

“Stop it.” Lawrence slams a fist against the countertop. “You have no idea how frustrating that is to hear. Like as if we both weren’t stuck in there - together. You’re not the only victim here.” Adam doesn’t say anything, all the words seemingly run out of the two of them and Lawrence for one feels exhausted. Adam’s hair escapes all at once from the loose elastic band and he makes no motion to adjust it. Adam becomes a stone, stock still. Lawrence doesn’t know what else there is left to say, there is too much guilt inside this room flowing like a river between the two of them to be resolved in the space of one night. Instead he grabs his beer and walks to the couch. The two sit in silence, drinking and watching a blank TV. 


	18. Chapter 18

Life continues and it seems more normal than before. Some portion of a wall broken down that night and it would be a lie to say it doesn’t feel nice to have some trace of the old Adam back. It’s not perfect, Adam still ducks into the small closet at the end of the hall, but the positive signs are that he’s helped move boxes from the hallway into the kitchen under the sink. He’s moved the few clothing items into the bedroom closet. One check back into the negatives column is that he still doesn’t let Lawrence in. 

When Adam is out Lawrence tries the door to the closet and finds it locked tight. There is a huge part of him wants to bust down the door, rent be damned. He can pay for the damages. Inside his own mind he will install an even better door that would increase the rent for the next tenant. This dream is dashed, Lawrence is an adult and understands that is not how damage to a rental property works; calming his violent impulses by thinking of a potential eviction. He can’t handle trying to find a new place to rent walking distance from the hospital. The idea of house hunting makes him sick to his stomach and his mind spin. 

Why would that little shit lock a closet? What was he hiding? 

The possibilities are endless but the single thought that haunts Lawrence the most are the eyes. He can’t rest for a second without thinking of the green cat eyes inside the envelope and how Adam says he’s never seen anything like that. How the evidence was gone without a trace - short of the bruises nobody can erase. Lawrence digs inside the junk drawers until he finds a cluster of bobby pins that a previous tenant must have left. Maybe they’re Adam’s for keeping his unruly locks back. It doesn’t matter at all and within a few seconds he straightens one to a long pick, wondering what Adam’s words must have meant. 

Rationally there are only three options. 1. Lawrence made the whole thing up. Which was very possible. The only downside to this route is that Lawrence is positive he did not make it up. He would risk his other foot on the bet that he had at least seen those eyes that night. 2. Jigsaw, or an accomplice, had done this. Mutilated the cat, stolen the eyes, delivered them to Lawrence’s apartment and then stole them back after he had passed out. This seemed too far fetched and outlandish even for a man who was both a sadistic genius as well as dead. Lawrence shoved the bobby pin into the small opening under the doorknob. He had no idea this door even could lock. He’d been in this cramped space for years, yet here he was learning the most simple things. He twisted one way then the other, listening for a click or any kind of give that would give evidence of the door opening. He waits and twists slower, his mind still spinning restlessly. All that remains is option 3. Adam is lying. With one and two ruled out three can be the only logical answer. He waits for any kind of noise or movement, yet none comes. When he pulls out the bobby pin he finds it’s bent into an unnatural shape. He leaves it on the floor and goes to the kitchen for a beer. 

_

  
  


Before he can even blink it’s Thanksgiving and he’s working a double, eight to midnight. He’s worked these shifts before and he hates them every time but his bank account doesn’t mind nearly as much. It’s not so much the feeling of missing a holiday, more the irritation of holiday emergencies that crawls under Lawrence’s skin like a parasite. 

There will always be a drunk uncle trying to deep fry a frozen turkey on his driveway. There will always be a child with burns from pulling something off the stove and onto his or her little arms, usually still thick with baby fat. There will always be electric carving knife accidents. So many couples fight after the family leaves. Spouses with broken noses with an apologetic tail. . Sometimes they come alone, sometimes in groups. Drunk drivers. Falls in unfamiliar homes leading to broken bones and costly payments before Christmas. It’s all so typical and the same. Not that those don’t happen every day, but on holidays it seems to turn into a never ending flood of these people. 

Lawrence wants to tell them all they are not special. Nobody here is different. You are not the first to do these things. You are not reinventing the wheel. He says nothing and treats what he can, writing scripts for referrals in physical therapy, antibiotics, Tylenol three. Jenna is wearing her trademark smile and her Thanksgiving scrubs, although a bit tighter than last year. 

“How do you always get stuck on Thanksgiving?” He asks, she sips her coffee - always decaf since she’s found out about her baby. 

“Just trying to get all my holidays in now so I can pull in favors in when this little guy gets here.” She pats her stomach and laughs, it’s loud and carefree as if she doesn’t care about the fifteen IV’s she’ll have to start before lunch. Maybe she doesn’t. In a different life Lawrence would have tried to pursue her; at least before the taut turkey on her stomach started to show. “Besides, I’m only seven to seven. So I call that a win. Plus overtime looks nice on me.” She smiles and walks to the back bay to see who’s unloading from the ambulance, no lights on so Lawrence assumes they’re dead or fine. Turns out he’s right, only having to sign a death certificate while an elderly man cries outside in the cold. 

As the day goes on he gets texts buzzing inside his pocket like a nest of persistent bees. Alison, Diana, Adam. 

“Happy Thanksgiving. Let me know if you need dinner, I can pack you up a try and have it on the stove for you to pick up. I’m sure you’re working.” 

“Happy Thanksgiving, daddy! :)” 

“When do you get off?” 

In that exact order. It’s funny that he can pick each texting style out per person without looking at the contact information. He politely declines Alison, tells Diana not too each too much stuffing or she’ll get sick like she used to when she was a little, and ignores Adam’s totally. If he’s still awake when he gets home he’ll say it was a busy day, which isn’t a lie at all. It’s been the steady stream of holiday fallen soldiers. If Lawrence is lucky Adam will be passed out watching reruns of the parade on public access. 

The nurses order out, getting it delivered from GrubHub as some kind of treat since the hospital stopped providing complimentary holiday dinners when the old owners sold it off a few years ago. They don’t ask Lawrence if he wants anything because he’ll say no. They get him a BLT with a bag of chips anyway. His usual order if he gets anything. He feels pangs of regret sometimes, looking at the nurses and his coworkers. The PAs, the nurse practitioners. Walking and talking and knowing things about each other like friends. He wonders if he can ever get close to somebody again or if he’s just too isolated to relate to others. He compromises by sitting at the nurses’ station with Amber and Jenna while he eats half of his sandwich. Jenna eats meatloaf loaded with ketchup and thick brown gravy, dipping fries into the runny mixture. 

“Keep that up and you’re for sure not going to fit into those scrubs next year.” Amber laughs while Jenna swats her. Lawrence breaks his silence to tell them stories of when Alison was pregnant, when he was finishing his day shift at the hospital - when he was still working to be an oncologist. She would call him and beg him to stop and get butter pecan ice cream and root beer. Alison always hated both of those things. Jenna listens intently like she too wants those things. A call light goes off pulling her from his trance. She swipes her hands on her brown pants. 

“Did you ever hear the story of the pirate with the brown pants?” Jenna calls over her shoulder even as she is turning and walking down the hall, leaving the two to think it over without an answer. It’s all so nice, not the death or the codes or missing fingers and third degree burns. This normalcy. He’s been close with this team for so long they work together well.

Lawrence gets another text around five, he’s taking a break outside, sitting on an ice cold bench and looking at the sky that is already darkening. He’s not shocked it’s from Adam, but he is shocked at what it says. 

“Cops were here today. Knocking on the door. I didn’t answer but I heard them. They left a note. I didn’t open it.”

“Cops or the detectives.” Lawrence types it out and sends quicker than he should.

“Didn’t see them. Didn’t open note. Idk. Sounded like cops to me.” 

Lawrence wants to tell him to talk in full sentences because missing letters are grating on his last nerve right now. His palms are itching. His whole body hurts. He’s been cutting down on everything, every vice he knows how to cut down on - and here he is wanting to dive back in the second things get dicey. He limps inside and cuts through the main hospital building to go to the lockers. Inside his old locker is a bottle of morphine, the little blue tablets the size of a little blue M&M. 

He shakes two out onto his palm. The name on the bottle is his. If anyone bothered to look it would all check out with his medical record number. The directions don’t matter. The refill date was last March and he is sure these are very, very old. He licks them off his palm and lets the rest of his day go in a blur. 


	19. Chapter 19

When Lawrence gets home he finds a notice on the door, folded up with his name on it. He doubts it’s anything official - more likely a “so sorry to miss you” note. He’s so tired he rips it down, crumpling it into his hands without opening it. Once inside it gets dropped straight to the floor. Maybe he’ll pick it up tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be kicked under the fridge. Maybe he’ll say somebody else stole it off the door before he could make it home. Nobody would ever even know. 

Adam is passed out on the couch, the TV playing some generic Christmas movie that is on a public access channel. Lawrence feels it’s too soon for Christmas music finding in this moment he would rather stick something sharp inside his ears and twist. He doesn’t. Adam only moves about two inches when he hears the door shut. It’s only the crack of one eye, only the smallest slit to lie about his sleeping state. The black and white movie plays off his pupil. 

“What time is it?” 

“Late.” 

“Thought you’d be home sooner.” Adam yawns, his arm sweeping the loose hair off his face for a second before it all falls back into disarray. Lawrence thinks in turns Adam looks best with his hair like this and that he looks awful and should chop it all off to where it was before. Adam makes no motion to sit up from his place on the couch. The younger man looks over at the TV, then stretches like a cat across the cushions. Lawrence can hear the pop of joints across the room. 

“Me too.” Lawrence doesn’t feel like talking too much about his day. It was fine until it wasn’t. Everything was normal, every single thing chugging along like clockwork until sometime around ten to twelve. It’s always as you’re putting on your coat to walk out the door. Full code. She was eighteen years old. Found unresponsive after she was hit by a drunk driver. A paramedic sitting on her chest and hammering to an unheard count. One- two- three- four. Some people teaching classes say to sing  _ staying alive  _ inside your head but once you are cracking ribs the song goes silent for some reason. Again and again and again until somebody else took over. Three nurses, respiratory, Lawrence standing at her head as he barked the usual orders. 

Lawrence though, he didn’t see a girl he didn’t know. He saw his daughter, laying there without any signs of brain function while they trached her - neuro be damned. Neuro wasn’t there to demand things from them and at midnight in the ER on a holiday it would take a long time before the covering would even come in. Lawrence thought of what he would do if it was Diana. He would freeze, he was sure. He would want everything done until all options were exhausted. 

He didn’t stop working on her, wouldn’t stop. He just couldn’t take his hands off her, couldn’t stop asking people to start lines, push drugs, check heart rate, shock her again - god damn it. If somebody could just give her two more fucking rescue breaths that might be the the tipping point. They had never gotten her stable. They had never even really  _ gotten _ her and if Lawrence was any kind of half decent doctor he would have pronounced a long time ago but he was a stubborn bastard. 

He searched her pockets himself, found her phone, her wallet. Her name was Maria. It sounded so old fashioned he wanted to cry. He called a number listed as  _ Momma  _ from the desk phone. It rang five times then went to voicemail. He left a vague message with the direct phone number to the ER nurse’s station. Then he sat down in a chair with his head held in his hands, waiting. Until the time he left they never got a call back. Lawrence was off the clock and wanted to wait even longer but the night shift nurses shooed him out with threats of calling upper management. 

“Bad day?” 

“You could say that.” 

“Sorry. I made dinner. In the fridge.” Adam yawns again. “Mind if I sleep? I’m exhausted.” 

“Thanks. It’s fine. I’ll eat later or something. I don’t think I’m hungry.” Lawrence didn’t think he would be hungry for another ten years. He wanted to call Alison and Diana and talk to them. Hear their voices. He looked at his phone. Four twenty one in the morning. Maybe Di would be up, texting her friends. Alison would be asleep, curled on her side with her blonde hair framing her face, her blankets thick and up to her chin just how she likes it when it’s cold. He put his phone back into his pocket. On his way to the bedroom he checks the closet door - still shut tightly. At this point it’s more reflex than true curiosity. If it were open Lawrence is sure he wouldn’t even go inside. 

Lawrence sleeps in all his clothes on top of his sheets and wonders when he went so far off the rails. 


End file.
